The Griffon News

In Walden, Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” The Outdoor Semester Program, first established in 1998 to explore the student and faculty interest in Native American culture, exemplifies Thoreau’s philosophy.

 

Expanded from its original inspiration, and headed by Western’s Dr. Elizabeth Latosi-Sawin, the program now allows students to explore the majority of the Lewis and Clark trails that head into South Dakota.

“In a way we’re reenacting it,” Sawin said, “and we’re taking what we need to get along out there.” The program will have students reading the original Lewis and Clark diaries, collecting information in journals, and essentially living a frontier-lifestyle as they camp in the wilderness along the way.

“You actually get to enter into the landscape of a novel,” Sawin said, “You start to listen to nature, to talk to each other over campfires, to find peace.” Those enrolled in the program will partially travel by canoe and raft to reach a landscape far from modernity. They’ll make notations of their first impressions of the physical geography and will forage for supplies while guided by a daily itinerary and Sawin.

“(It’s) a chance to go and explore just like Lewis and Clark did. To touch base and get a better and more clear understanding of what the Indian nation went through,” student Tawnya Lee said.

Some have even enrolled in the class because of personal ties to the trip’s history.

“I have Indian ancestors and it intrigued me,” Mickey Lindsey said. “My family has gone camping and we did reenactments, so this sort of thing is very exciting to me,” said Bonnie Seaboldt.

An example of applied, active learning, those enrolled in the Outdoor Semester will do more than face the elements; they’ll get in touch with the landscape of a removed culture and will find facts in nature and themselves. Thoreau would approve.