Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Andrew Frank. I'm a professor of history at Florida State University and I'm the director of our Native American and Indigenous Studies Center. I took an anthropology class as an MA student and went off to an archive thinking I was going to do research not on Native Americans, but on this thing that might have a native component to it. And I found someone who was doing my project. And I came home and I told my anthropologist, and he had, well, that's too bad. He'll find something else. And he told me the story about white indentured servants in the American style who ran from their masters or owners, married Indian women and took the trail of tears and became Creek Indians. And I had never heard anything like this before. He gave me the name of the two towns that they were supposedly to form. And I turned it into a semester long project which became a dissertation, which became my first book and kind of the trajectory of my career. And I haven't looked back. In the field that I study, we're learning new things all the time and things and facts, if you will, that I thought I really knew even three, four, five years ago I'm reconsidering. In part because Native people are playing a larger role in the conversations and what types of questions we're asking and how to measure evidence. And that's been really exciting. And having collaborative work makes it even more fun. Well, let me make the case for all of humanities. So STEM allows us to live in many ways. But humanities are why we live. If there's a world without museums and there's a world without beautiful stories and there's a world without all the stuff that the humanities provides and our ability to understand it, we're just surviving. And so humanities for me provides the color to the rest of our life. Otherwise, things are just sketches and they're important. But I don't think you can have one without the other. My name is Andrew Frank. I'm a professor of history at Florida State University and I'm our director of our Native American and Indigenous Studies Center. You're listening to voices that inspire.