In February 2000, Bathsheba Demuth '06 embarked on a sled dog training run that ended with her lying face down on the ground, blood from a gash in her forehead staining the white Yukon snow. Although she had been training and racing dogs for four months, her sled flipped when she crossed an icy patch, one mile from the nearest town.
"I was flying off the back of the sled and I thought it was over," Demuth said. A heavy iron snow hook also flew out of the sled and hit Demuth's forehead. Although shocked and isolated, Demuth was able to reach home and receive treatment for her injury.
Demuth's resourcefulness has served her well in the years since. At Brown, she created her own concentration - trauma studies - and served as an independent concentration coordinator at the Curricular Resource Center.
Professor of Comparative Literature Arnold Weinstein, who advised Demuth during her first two years, said she has made the most of what Brown has to offer, calling her "a curricular success story." "She's found ways to adapt herself to Brown and to adapt Brown to herself."
Demuth's journey to Brown began in Decorah, a small, isolated town in Iowa. After being home-schooled, she set out for Old Crow, an even smaller, more isolated town 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Canada's Yukon Territory.
"I didn't feel like I had a sense of things outside of school," Demuth said. While still in Iowa, Demuth read an article in her local newspaper about the Center for Interim Programs, a consulting service that helps students unaffiliated with an institution find a gap-year program, or in Demuth's case, a two-year program, 3,000 miles from home.
"(The article) came along at the right moment," she said.
In August 1999, Demuth flew to Old Crow, the only town in the Yukon inaccessible by road.
Only 300 people inhabit the town, and most belong to a Native American group called the Vuntut Gwich'in that has received attention for its vehement lobbying against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Old Crow residents are suspicious of outsiders because many believe they emphasize the community's social problems and weaken the community's credibility with the outside world, Demuth said.
From the start, Demuth made it clear to her host family, and the rest of Old Crow, that she was different from other outsiders. "I wasn't trying to make anyone do anything," she said. "I told them, 'You just have to teach me everything,' and that made things a lot easier." Still, it took at least six weeks for Demuth to establish a comfortable relationship with the community.
Among other things, Demuth's host family in Old Crow taught her how to mush, or race dogs. However, Demuth had to learn to fend for herself, often training and racing her dogs alone for hours at a time. If a dog got loose, or something else went wrong on a run, Demuth had to use her own ingenuity to solve the problem.
Demuth trained her dogs for long distance circuits. Her longest race ever, 220 miles, took her 30 hours, including a six-hour mandatory rest, to complete.
"My family told me, 'Once you've done this, you'll be able to do anything,' and they were right," Demuth said. "The margin for error is a lot more extreme than with anything else I've done. After being able to do that, Brown seems easy."
Demuth was accepted to Brown in spring 2001 but chose to defer matriculation for a year to write about her experiences in the Yukon. She completed the book and sent it to publishing companies before she came to Brown in fall 2002. When it is published, her book will be the first popular press book about Old Crow.
Demuth took advantage of Brown's academic freedom by designing her own concentration, trauma studies. Creating and completing this concentration, which she described as a mix of social sciences and comparative literature, has taken up much of her time at Brown. Yet her experiences in the Yukon shaped her college education.
"I designed my concentration backwards from my senior thesis," which was about social problems in Old Crow, she said. Demuth needed "analytical tools" to write about what interested her and took classes to acquire them. Demuth said she also wanted to explore the unique process of colonization in the Yukon and its legacy in Old Crow.
Demuth continued to broaden her horizons during her undergraduate career. Last summer, with the help of Assistant Professor of Anthropology Daniel Smith, Demuth found a job in Nigeria where she could explore her interest in public health.
For the past several years, Brown students have worked with Community and Youth Development Initiatives, a non-governmental organization run by two Nigerians in Owerri, a city in southeastern Nigeria. Demuth said Nigerians were friendly to her from the start, unlike the Gwich'in, who took time warming to her because she was an outsider.
Nigerians' perceptions of Demuth sometimes complicated her job - to assess the needs of city-dwellers and villagers nearby, prevent the spread of HIV and help the city's youth. "Sometimes people would say what they thought you wanted to hear," she said, which was frustrating to her, because she wanted to understand what problems existed and how she could help.
Demuth said some Nigerians, especially men in Owerri, were overly solicitous, and she initially wore a wedding ring to deter such attention, but her male acquaintances eventually discovered the truth, and a few were brave enough to take advantage of that knowledge.
Although Nigerian society is "pretty patriarchal," Demuth said she usually felt comfortable as a woman in Owerri, because Nigerians did not expect her to behave like a Nigerian woman. It would have been more difficult for her to conform to expectations for a Nigerian woman, she added.
Demuth will continue to pursue her interest in social work this summer, when she will work at the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter and his wife that promotes conflict resolution and social justice around the world.
After her time at the Carter Center, Demuth would like to join the Peace Corps and work in an Arabic-, Russian- or Chinese-speaking country to learn one of the languages.
