A figure dances to the pounding beat of Native American drums, the fringe on her shawl flying, beaded necklaces swaying to the rhythm of American Indian chanting, a mass of flaming red hair bouncing about her shoulders.
Flaming red hair?
It’s unexpected at a pow-wow. And just as unexpected atop a curator for a museum comprising American Indian artifacts.
But Marcy Lautenen-Raleigh, 28, is full of surprises. An outspoken woman dedicated to her task, she has, in the last three years, almost single-handedly taken some bare rooms, littered with paint cans, in the far corner of a new building at Aurora University and turned it into the much-respected and well-attended Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures.
And in the process, she recently had the honor of winning the Daniel Malkovich Award for Young Museum Professionals, awarded by the Congress of Illinois Historical Societies and Museums (CIHSM).
The award is designed to honor museum professionals who have made a significant contribution to the field at a relatively young age, said Susan Stob, director of the Du Page County Historical Museum, Wheaton, and chairwoman of the awards committee.
Malkovich, said Stob, was a museum professional who was formerly the Illinois director of conservation, founder and publisher of Illinois Magazine, active in the Illinois Historical Society and a champion of preservation and conservation of cultural and natural resources in Illinois before he died in 1980.
The annual award in his name is given to a person under 30 who most nearly exhibits the quality of professionalism reflective of the namesake, she said.
“The whole idea behind the award is to encourage young museum professionals to work hard and excel,” said Stob. “Let’s face it. When you’re a young person starting out in this field, the monetary reimbursements are not always the best, and we feel it’s important to reward those people who give that extra percentage.
“It would be very easy, at that level, for them to go into business and try and make more money.”
Funding, as most people know, is also equally as scarce for museum projects, making the job of creating professional-looking exhibits even more challenging, said Stob.
“And Marcy has literally had to build that museum from nothing. What she’s done has shown incredible initiative, determination and professionalism,” said Stob.
Indeed, when Lautenen-Raleigh walked down the stairs of Dunham Hall in 1989 as the new curator of the Schingoethe Center, the building wasn’t finished.
“You should have seen the place,” Lautenen-Raleigh recalled with a laugh. “We had no ceiling, four bare light bulbs hung 15 feet from the floor, and there was no carpet. It was like a cave. Tiles from all over the building were stored in one corner. I said, `I get to make a museum out of this? Thank you very much.’ “
Such a daunting task might have intimidated more seasoned professionals, said Stob, but youth was on Lautenen-Raleigh’s side.
She dug in with a fervor, beginning by cataloging the artifacts that would serve as the backbone of the museum, items collected through the years by Herbert and Martha Schingoethe of Aurora, namesakes of the museum who have set up an endowment to keep it funded.
Originally, said Lautenen-Raleigh, the Schingoethes thought their pieces would be set up by a faculty member in some nice display somewhere in the corner of the university for people wandering by to enjoy.
“But the university made a decision that showed a lot of forethought,” she said. “They took advantage of the situation and decided to make it professional by hiring a curator and running it as a museum. It was something the area needed, and it fills a niche.”
Lautenen-Raleigh borrowed some shelving from the Du Page County Museum, built other pieces herself and opened the center with a grand celebration of a pow-wow on Aug. 12, 1990. In all, it took 15 months to get the museum up and running.
“It seems like a long time, but I started with nothing,” she said.
Now, Lautenen-Raleigh laughs about the hard work that went into getting the museum open, remembering the stress of opening day, when they were still making labels for exhibits two hours before the opening reception.
“The janitors came over to dust and vacuum at 4 o’clock and we still had a table saw up,” she said. “They said we’d never make it. But at 6 o’clock, the saw was gone and we were done, although fashionably late. It was harrowing.”
Oddly enough, Lautenen-Raleigh first got interested in museum work while dusting off animal heads as a student in a work study program at Beloit College in Wisconsin.
“It was my first job and it was pretty disgusting, but actually kind of funny. I thought it was better than working in food service,” she joked.
At that time, Lautenen-Raleigh had intended to major in archeology, but when she went on her first dig in 1984, she found out she wasn’t cut out for the brutal conditions of a dig.
“We were in the Southwest. It was hot and summer,” she said. “I got sun poisoning even though I wore long sleeves and sunscreen. I knew I would never be able to do this for a living. It would have never worked. By 40, I would be dead.”
So the curator of the college museum took Lautenen-Raleigh under her wing and taught her all about preserving collections and setting up exhibits.
“I discovered I like much more working with what is found than doing the actual digging,” she said.
At the same time, she met her husband, Chas, while at Beloit College, and he also became interested in museum work.
Then Lautenen-Raleigh did intern work at the Logan Museum of Anthropology in Beloit and worked summers for the historical society of her hometown in Ashtabula, Ohio.
After graduating, Lautenen-Raleigh landed a job at the Museum of Indian Heritage in Indianapolis (now part of the Eiteljorg Museum) before moving up to Chicago and marrying Chas Raleigh, who now works as farm manager at Kline Creek Farm in West Chicago, part of the Du Page County Forest Preserve.
He convinced her she could easily find work in the Chicago area.
Coincidentally, Aurora University was looking for a curator knowledgeable about Native American artifacts.
“We searched long and hard,” said Thomas Zarle, president of Aurora University, who said they wanted someone who would present the Schingoethe collection in an educational manner but would also reach out to the community outside the college.
“She fit the bill. We didn’t think we were taking a chance (on hiring someone so young),” said Zarle. “We wanted someone who would grow with the museum, not impose something on us. We were all entering a new venture.”
The university is proud of Lautenen-Raleigh for winning the Malkovich Award, said Zarle.
“We’ve been very excited by it, that she was recognized in her profession by her peers. We made a pretty good investment,” he said.
In addition, the museum has grown to be very popular in the community, especially with students from the Du Page and Kane County areas, said Zarle.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that there aren’t school buses around the building,” he said. “We’ve had to expand the staff because of the demand.”
In fact, the museum is always booked, sometimes months ahead of time, for the 16 tours it gives every week, said Lautenen-Raleigh. For those students who can’t come to the museum for a tour, Lautenen-Raleigh has put together 45 different discovery boxes, a teaching tool containing slides, artifacts, movies and background material, to help an educator lead a class on a particular topic.
For instance, one box explains the kachina doll of the Hopi Pueblo and contains some finished kachinas as well as cotton, wood, paint and tools used for making them.
Introducing the discovery boxes to the museum is probably one of the reasons that Lautenen-Raleigh won the Malkovich Award, said Denyse Cunningham, assistant curator at the Schingoethe museum, who has worked in the museum field for 10 years, the last two with Lautenen-Raleigh.
“She’s done a marvelous job with those,” said Cunningham. “Even bigger museums have trouble putting out discovery boxes.”
Lautenen-Raleigh is described by others as having a bubbly personality and is sometimes mistaken for a university student in her blue-jean jacket that sports old Monkees buttons.
What she says she likes best about being in a museum is putting up an exhibit. The research is fun, and designing it is fun, but putting it together can sometimes be frustrating.
“The actual installation can sometimes be very annoying because you decide you want it to look a certain way, but the materials may not work and you have to find something else,” she said. “Or something that should have taken you five minutes to put up takes two days, and those always happen right before the exhibit opens, and that makes you hate it. Then people people say it’s really nice, and you remember how much you wanted to do it in the first place.”
It’s rewarding, too, once an exhibit is up, she said, to listen to people comment on it as they walk through or ask questions.
“Obviously you’ve sparked their curiosity,” she said.
And even though she was well versed in the history of American Indians, she didn’t understand the depth of their culture until working at the Schingoethe Center, said Lautenen-Raleigh.
“After I started working here with the Native Americans directly, who helped me plan events and pulled me into their culture to teach me things they felt were important for me to know, then I gained a true understanding of the idea of pluralism, that Native Americans do consider themselves American, but they don’t feel to be an American they must give up being a Native American.”
The collection at Schingoethe is somewhat unusual, said Lautenen-Raleigh, because it is composed largely of contemporary items, and that forces her to get involved in contemporary issues.
“Before,” she said, “it had been very easy to deal with items that were only in the past. There was no controversy. Now I have to sit down and find out if this activity is offensive, would they not like me to put this material on exhibit, or in this way?”
Lautenen-Raleigh said she spends a lot of time consulting with the American Indian Center in Chicago to get opinions, although the answers often differ from tribe to tribe.
“Whenever you speak to a Native American, they will always say, `I can only speak for myself.’ They are very upfront about that,” she said, mentioning the recent controversy over the term Redskins, which some American Indians say they do not find insulting.
“Alan Walker, who is on our advisory board and is an Omaha-Winnebago, says he finds that to be one of the most offensive terms used to talk about Native American people,” she said. “It’s a slur. Although, he kids me that after I’ve been out in the sun, I’m redder than he could ever get.”
“She was a great supporter of getting the name Redskins changed at Naperville Central High School,” said Walker, who added that Lautenen-Raleigh goes right to the source to research the way things should be displayed to be sure she doesn’t offend anybody.
“We have a very good rapport,” he said.
“She has a keen sensitivity. Right from the beginning, she sought their counsel,” said Zarle, “so they’ve been with us (on building the museum) right from the beginning. We weren’t doing this to them. We were stewards of something that was theirs, and they were sharing with us.
“It’s exciting, and those of us who are not Native Americans are discovering the meaning and the face it. When you’re a young person starting out in this field, the monetary reimbursements are not always the best, and we feel it’s important to reward those people who give that extra percentage.
“It would be very easy, at that level, for them to go into business and try and make more money.”
Funding, as most people know, is also equally as scarce for museum projects, making the job of creating professional-looking exhibits even more challenging, said Stob.
“And Marcy has literally had to build that museum from nothing. What she’s done has shown incredible initiative, determination and professionalism,” said Stob.
Indeed, when Lautenen-Raleigh walked down the stairs of Dunham Hall in 1989 as the new curator of the Schingoethe Center, the building wasn’t finished.
“You should have seen the place,” Lautenen-Raleigh recalled with a laugh. “We had no ceiling, four bare light bulbs hung 15 feet from the floor, and there was no carpet. It was like a cave. Tiles from all over the building were stored in one corner. I said, `I get to make a museum out of this? Thank you very much.’ “
Such a daunting task might have intimidated more seasoned professionals, said Stob, but youth was on Lautenen-Raleigh’s side.
She dug in with a fervor, beginning by cataloging the artifacts that would serve as the backbone of the museum, items collected through the years by Herbert and Martha Schingoethe of Aurora, namesakes of the museum who have set up an endowment to keep it funded.
Originally, said Lautenen-Raleigh, the Schingoethes thought their pieces would be set up by a faculty member in some nice display somewhere in the corner of the university for people wandering by to enjoy.
“But the university made a decision that showed a lot of forethought,” she said. “They took advantage of the situation and decided to make it professional by hiring a curator and running it as a museum. It was something the area needed, and it fills a niche.”
Lautenen-Raleigh borrowed some shelving from the Du Page County Museum, built other pieces herself and opened the center with a grand celebration of a pow-wow on Aug. 12, 1990. In all, it took 15 months to get the museum up and running.
“It seems like a long time, but I started with nothing,” she said.
Now, Lautenen-Raleigh laughs about the hard work that went into getting the museum open, remembering the stress of opening day, when they were still making labels for exhibits two hours before the opening reception.
“The janitors came over to dust and vacuum at 4 o’clock and we still had a table saw up,” she said. “They said we’d never make it. But at 6 o’clock, the saw was gone and we were done, although fashionably late. It was harrowing.”
Oddly enough, Lautenen-Raleigh first got interested in museum work while dusting off animal heads as a student in a work study program at Beloit College in Wisconsin.
“It was my first job and it was pretty disgusting, but actually kind of funny. I thought it was better than working in food service,” she joked.
At that time, Lautenen-Raleigh had intended to major in archeology, but when she went on her first dig in 1984, she found out she wasn’t cut out for the brutal conditions of a dig.
“We were in the Southwest. It was hot and summer,” she said. “I got sun poisoning even though I wore long sleeves and sunscreen. I knew I would never be able to do this for a living. It would have never worked. By 40, I would be dead.”
So the curator of the college museum took Lautenen-Raleigh under her wing and taught her all about preserving collections and setting up exhibits.
“I discovered I like much more working with what is found than doing the actual digging,” she said.
At the same time, she met her husband, Chas, while at Beloit College, and he also became interested in museum work.
Then Lautenen-Raleigh did intern work at the Logan Museum of Anthropology in Beloit and worked summers for the historical society of her hometown in Ashtabula, Ohio.
After graduating, Lautenen-Raleigh landed a job at the Museum of Indian Heritage in Indianapolis (now part of the Eiteljorg Museum) before moving up to Chicago and marrying Chas Raleigh, who now works as farm manager at Kline Creek Farm in West Chicago, part of the Du Page County Forest Preserve.
He convinced her she could easily find work in the Chicago area.
Coincidentally, Aurora University was looking for a curator knowledgeable about Native American artifacts.
“We searched long and hard,” said Thomas Zarle, president of Aurora University, who said they wanted someone who would present the Schingoethe collection in an educational manner but would also reach out to the community outside the college.
“She fit the bill. We didn’t think we were taking a chance (on hiring someone so young),” said Zarle. “We wanted someone who would grow with the museum, not impose something on us. We were all entering a new venture.”
The university is proud of Lautenen-Raleigh for winning the Malkovich Award, said Zarle.
“We’ve been very excited by it, that she was recognized in her profession by her peers. We made a pretty good investment,” he said.
In addition, the museum has grown to be very popular in the community, especially with students from the Du Page and Kane County areas, said Zarle.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that there aren’t school buses around the building,” he said. “We’ve had to expand the staff because of the demand.”
In fact, the museum is always booked, sometimes months ahead of time, for the 16 tours it gives every week, said Lautenen-Raleigh. For those students who can’t come to the museum for a tour, Lautenen-Raleigh has put together 45 different discovery boxes, a teaching tool containing slides, artifacts, movies and background material, to help an educator lead a class on a particular topic.
For instance, one box explains the kachina doll of the Hopi Pueblo and contains some finished kachinas as well as cotton, wood, paint and tools used for making them.
Introducing the discovery boxes to the museum is probably one of the reasons that Lautenen-Raleigh won the Malkovich Award, said Denyse Cunningham, assistant curator at the Schingoethe museum, who has worked in the museum field for 10 years, the last two with Lautenen-Raleigh.
“She’s done a marvelous job with those,” said Cunningham. “Even bigger museums have trouble putting out discovery boxes.”
Lautenen-Raleigh is described by others as having a bubbly personality and is sometimes mistaken for a university student in her blue-jean jacket that sports old Monkees buttons.
What she says she likes best about being in a museum is putting up an exhibit. The research is fun, and designing it is fun, but putting it together can sometimes be frustrating.
“The actual installation can sometimes be very annoying because you decide you want it to look a certain way, but the materials may not work and you have to find something else,” she said. “Or something that should have taken you five minutes to put up takes two days, and those always happen right before the exhibit opens, and that makes you hate it. Then people people say it’s really nice, and you remember how much you wanted to do it in the first place.”
It’s rewarding, too, once an exhibit is up, she said, to listen to people comment on it as they walk through or ask questions.
“Obviously you’ve sparked their curiosity,” she said.
And even though she was well versed in the history of American Indians, she didn’t understand the depth of their culture until working at the Schingoethe Center, said Lautenen-Raleigh.
“After I started working here with the Native Americans directly, who helped me plan events and pulled me into their culture to teach me things they felt were important for me to know, then I gained a true understanding of the idea of pluralism, that Native Americans do consider themselves American, but they don’t feel to be an American they must give up being a Native American.”
The collection at Schingoethe is somewhat unusual, said Lautenen-Raleigh, because it is composed largely of contemporary items, and that forces her to get involved in contemporary issues.
“Before,” she said, “it had been very easy to deal with items that were only in the past. There was no controversy. Now I have to sit down and find out if this activity is offensive, would they not like me to put this material on exhibit, or in this way?”
Lautenen-Raleigh said she spends a lot of time consulting with the American Indian Center in Chicago to get opinions, although the answers often differ from tribe to tribe.
“Whenever you speak to a Native American, they will always say, `I can only speak for myself.’ They are very upfront about that,” she said, mentioning the recent controversy over the term Redskins, which some American Indians say they do not find insulting.
“Alan Walker, who is on our advisory board and is an Omaha-Winnebago, says he finds that to be one of the most offensive terms used to talk about Native American people,” she said. “It’s a slur. Although, he kids me that after I’ve been out in the sun, I’m redder than he could ever get.”
“She was a great supporter of getting the name Redskins changed at Naperville Central High School,” said Walker, who added that Lautenen-Raleigh goes right to the source to research the way things should be displayed to be sure she doesn’t offend anybody.
“We have a very good rapport,” he said.
“She has a keen sensitivity. Right from the beginning, she sought their counsel,” said Zarle, “so they’ve been with us (on building the museum) right from the beginning. We weren’t doing this to them. We were stewards of something that was theirs, and they were sharing with us.
“It’s exciting, and those of us who are not Native Americans are discovering the meaning and the rich heritage of what the cultures have been contributing to our society all along.”
“She is doing wonderful things in raising the consciousness of Native Americans in this area,” added Elizabeth Marston, curator of collections at the Lake County Museum.
“She has taken something which was basically a private collection, and she’s made it into a professional institution,” said Marston.
And the Schingoethes couldn’t be more pleased, said Martha Schingoethe.
“Our aim in giving our collection and its housing to the Aurora University was to have others not only enjoy looking at the very talent of Native Americans but to learn of them and their varying cultures,” she said.
Lautenen-Raleigh has accomplished those goals, she said.
“We feel the Schingoethe Center and the surrounding communities are very fortunate to have Marcy leading the Native American education here. It was a proud moment for us to be in attendance when she received the Malkovich Award,” she said.
The ability to be able to bridge many different types of people is one of the talents Lautenen-Raleigh has that makes her so successful, added Phil Courington, sites manager at Kline Creek Farm and who helped nominate her for the CIHSM award.
“She has a lot of people to keep happy, plus keep her own integrity satisfied, and she does a good job of keeping all the balls in the air at the same time,” he said. “She has a lot of masters to serve: the donors, the public, the university. She is able to shift effortlessly between all of these. A rigid person couldn’t do what she does.”
In addition, another gift Lautenen-Raleigh possesses is the ability to share her knowledge. It sounds easy, but often isn’t, he said.
“She not only understands the big issues but is willing to share them in a really lively way with someone who doesn’t know anything,” Courington said. “Some experts only want to talk to other experts. She has never lost sight of how important it is to talk to people who don’t know a thing. And, she has an uncanny knack for knowing who she’s speaking with, can talk to somebody for 10 seconds and pick up what they know and what they would like to know. She’s a good listener.”
Plus, she has lots of energy and a sense of humor, added Courington, telling how she often pitches in to help out at events that are staged at Kline Creek Farm, where she lives with Chas.
At one event, she worked for hours without relief, guiding thousands of people through the working farm house at Kline Creek.
Not only does Lautenen-Raleigh come home to museum life by living at Kline Creek Farm, she and her husband often center their vacations around visiting museums.
“I guess that’s the reason we ended up in the field,” she said.
Although the Raleighs work at two totally different types of museums-Marcy at a more traditional type, Chas at a living history museum-they often have heated battles about museum topics such as artifact management.
“Sometimes the disagreements get loud,” said Chas.
But there’s an upside to being married to another museum professional, he said.
“There’s a great deal of technical and personal support for each other,” he said. “She has her areas of expertise, and I have mine, and so if there’s a question that comes up, she’s the first person I can usually turn to.
“She constantly impresses me with her knowledge. I see myself as being very academic, and Marcy is a good balance to that. I’ll sit at home and work on projects, and she wants to go out and do something. She draws me out.”
Chas was also nominated for the Malkovich Award but said he suspected Marcy would win it all along and is proud that she did.
“It’s very nice for her to have that reassurance from her peer group,” he said.
In her spare time in the spring and summer, Lautenen-Raleigh likes to work in her herb garden at Kline Creek Farm. Some of the plants she grows are Victorian herbs and Native American plants, such as sweet grass, which smells sweet when it is burned, she said.
And several times a year, she meets up with her Ohio childhood chum Donna Shrake and they spend the weekends writing novels geared toward teenage readers. Lautenen-Raleigh had one published, titled “Thinking of You,” when she was in college.
“I love her, she is my best friend,” said Shrake. “My daughter worships her and wants to be just like her. (Marcy’s) very committed to what she does. When she sets out to do something, she does it well. And museum life suits her.”
And she suits the museum life, agreed Courington.
“People like Marcy make the museum business stay alive. She just has a terrific blend of knowledge and a knack for education,” he said.
“She has a unique position on the campus of Aurora University in that predominantly the people that come to the museum are not the college students,” said Lauralyn Theodore, chairman of the museum’s advisory board. “She’s brought another type of visibility to the university and the whole Native American image to the western suburbs.”
But, as far as Lautenen-Raleigh is concerned, she has barely begun. There’s still a lot of work to do.
“We’ve moved with such lightning speed to get to where we are, it would be nice to slow down and take stock,” she said. Her staff now has grown to include a full-time educator, a part-time curator and a curator assistant who works 12 hours a week.
Improving the exhibits they already have is a top priority, she said, plus never letting up on educating the community about Native American cultures.
“We are so ingrained with stereotypes,” she said. “We just had an editorial in one of the local newspapers (encouraging readers) to stop saying that Columbus was so bad because he brought the banner of Christian civilization to cultures characterized by widespread pestilence and worship of idols.
“But there was very little ritualistic cannibalism, and they didn’t worship inanimate objects. They believed they had spirits and could help you but didn’t worship them. I get real tired of that, because it’s just not correct.
“We still have a long way to go.”
———-
The Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures, Dunham Hall, Randall Road at Marseillaise Place, Aurora University, is open 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and 1-4 p.m. Sunday. Closed Wednesday, Saturday and Aurora University holidays. The next Native American Pow-Wow is scheduled for May 15-16, 1993. For information, call 708-844-5402.
