Folklorist at Utah State receives lifetime achievement award from national society
Over the last 20 years, Elaine Thatcher has interviewed hundreds of people – from a blind South Dakotan bead-maker to Laotian immigrants – and developed an appreciation for the uniqueness of their life stories.
Last month, the Utah State University folklorist was awarded the Benjamin A. Botkin prize by the American Folklore Society in recognition of her own lifetime achievements. Thatcher was in Milwaukee on Oct. 18 to accept the award at the society’s annual meeting.
Having served on the committee that has selected past recipients, Thatcher is honored to be included in it and Botkin’s company.
“It’s an amazing feeling because the people who’ve won this award are really outstanding in our field, and I never, ever thought that I was part of that group,” Thatcher said.
Botkin, who died in 1975, was a pioneer in public sector folklore, Thatcher said, noting before him, folklore was largely an academic discipline. Everything he did, Thatcher said, was oriented toward “helping people understand their own heritage.” As director of the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at USU, Thatcher said she similarly supports the research of faculty in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in an effort to foster public awareness.
Thatcher, who graduated from USU in 1983, said she wrote her master’s thesis on “Cache Valley furniture before the railroad: handmade furniture in the pioneer period.”
She subsequently became the first graduate from the folklore program.
Because the program was small, Thatcher didn’t start with the background students have now. Instead, she said, she depended largely on the mentorship of her peers and teachers to learn her profession.
“I feel real strongly that I need to pass that same thing along to others,” Thatcher said, citing mentorship as one criterion on which the award panel focused.
Lisa Duskin-Goede, an independent folklorist who graduated from USU in 2004, said Thatcher was not only a mentor to her, but is also a good writer, researcher and director and one who understands equally the public sector and academic sides of folkore. Though Thatcher was surprised to receive the prestigious award, Duskin-Goede said she deserved to win it.
“She’s one of those people who’s really put her life into this,” Duskin-Goede said.
Thatcher has worked all over the country, including in the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution, where she had short-term contracts. She was South Dakota’s first state folklorist and has since worked throughout the Southwest. A large portion of her career has been dedicated to obtaining grants for folk artists and arts programs. She became the director of the Mountain West Center in 2001.
“Utah has a particularly high concentration of folklorists,” Thatcher said, making the state an enjoyable place to work. Mormons’ genealogy is linked to the number of folklorists in the state, she said. “I think it all ties in. They’re interested in their own history and they have an appreciation for their heritage,” she said.
Thatcher is working on a sesquicentennial commemoration of the Utah War of 1857-58, she stated in an e-mail. The next Mountain West Songfest, for which she never stops working, is in 2008.