Paula Rabkin

I transferred to University of Pennsylvania for my junior and senior year to study social cultural anthropology of Native North America with John Witthoft. I turned a position volunteering at the Museum into an actual paying job. Living in a 14-story university apartment block with 3 nursing majors who didn't need to study was so different than Oberlin. Senior year I lived off campus with a friend of a friend in an old Victorian house that was divided into small apartments. My roommate's father worked in a Chinatown restaurant and she learned cooking techniques from him. I knew how to read a recipe so between the two of us we made some fine meals, beginning most evenings with a pot of rice, half for her beloved Boxer dog and the other half divided between us.
After graduation I went to Yale on an NSF graduate fellowship. Sometime during the Spring a friend saw a notice on the anthro. department bulletin board about a 1-year fellowship in Washington DC on the Handbook of North American Indians at.the Smithsonian. I learned how to edit and proofread articles by senior scholars from a fine editor and how to select and caption illustrations. I had a stack pass for the Library of Congress!

After graduation I went to Yale on a NSF graduate fellowship. Towards the end of my first year

Back at Yale I put together a thesis proposal to work with a group of people who were learning about their Native heritage through
participation in the powwow circuit. The group was fraught with internal political divisions. And in the year that i was away my senior advisor was replaced by a professor who didn't believe it was anthropology if the people only spoke English. In the meantime i was asked by the Schagticote tribe in nw Connecticut for help in researching and writing their ethnohistory. I got a 1 year Connecticut Humanities Council scholar in residence grant. This work, too, was riven with interior and exterior political divides. To make a long story shorter, I never finished that project nor did I get it approved as a thesis. However, after I moved to Virginia I was twice visited by representatives of the tribe and I shared my research results with them, giving them a foundation for their federal application for tribal recognition.
I was only able to get a part time adjunct teaching position in Sociology at the local community college and the semester that I was offered 2 classes to teach I couldn't accept because I was making more money at minimum wage-and-a-half at Crown Books during the holiday season. I went to a crash secretarial training course, worked for two temp agencies, got a secretarial job with a defense contractor and rewrote my job description as a technical writer and editor, was loaned to the Postal Service, and then was offered a job as a technical writer and editor in the Finance Department.....and thus began a 30 year career at USPS headquarters. I had a wide variety of jobs including a detail to speechwriting and 12 years in the Historian's office, researching, writing, editing, and caring for historical artifacts.
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One of the funniest school memories was joining friends who had purloined some dining hall trays and sledding in the moonlit darkness down a hill they found somewhere near campus.

Yes, for sure

I can't remember a thing about my sophomore year winter term. I know I wanted to teach a Navajo weaving class but it was shot down for "not being relevant." I do remember my delight in attending the gamelan performance that was the finale of some other students' project.
Freshman year I spent winter term with a family on the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation, helping out in the
Freedom School developed by the tribe to preserve their language and culture. I learned how ash splint and sweet grass baskets were made. And I learned about true hospitality from the family of 13 who let me be the first to use the water in the bathtub that they had heated on the stove.