Ohio Wesleyan Student Honored for Work With Lakota Nation
Senior Annie Pappenhagen Earns Ping Award in Recognition of Outstanding Community Service
Annie Pappenhagen ’15
DELAWARE, Ohio – Even before she came to Ohio Wesleyan University, Annie Pappenhagen had a connection with the Indigenous peoples of the Lakota Nation in South Dakota, and she has deepened and shared that connection during her four years as an OWU student.
Pappenhagen had visited the Pine Ridge Reservation three times before coming to Ohio Wesleyan, and she has returned five times since through a variety of programs.
“I started going to Pine Ridge Reservation my junior year of high school when I was 16, through a class trip with my American History teacher,” said Pappenhagen, a psychology and sociology-anthropology double major from Wilmington, Delaware.
“Indigenous issues are the United States’ dirty little secret, and Native people are in many ways still invisible,” she said. “It is important to stop the cycle of colonialism by listening to what their community thinks is best and becoming allies, rather than continuing to speak for them.”
For her work, Pappenhagen has earned a 2015 Charles J. Ping Student Community Service Award from the Ohio Campus Compact. Based in Granville, Ohio, the compact is a nonprofit coalition of Ohio colleges and universities working together to promote and develop the civic purposes of higher education.
“Annie’s intellectual curiosity, her desire to share the story of the Lakota, her continued example of genuine servant leadership, and her inclusive nature have resonated with the Ohio Wesleyan community,” President Rock Jones, Ph.D., said in nominating Pappenhagen for the Ping Award. “Today the university’s relationship with the Lakota is an important part of our story, as well.”
As an Ohio Wesleyan freshman, Pappenhagen participated in a university mission trip to the Lakota Nation at Rosebud Reservation, which borders the Pine Ridge Reservation she visited in high school. Pine Ridge has been described as “a poster child of American poverty” in a New York Times opinion piece, and Rosebud traditionally has fallen close behind in turns of poverty.
During her time at Ohio Wesleyan, Pappenhagen returned to Rosebud, as well as Chicago and Minneapolis, as part of a Travel-Learning Course on Native American Literature the end of her sophomore year, and she led a spring break mission team to Rosebud during her junior year.
In between her junior and senior years, Pappenhagen conducted three weeks of on-site independent research on “Historical Trauma and Cultural Embeddedness in the Lakota People: Links to Narrative Characteristics,” and led a team to Pine Ridge during her senior spring break.
For her research, Pappenhagen conducted interviews with several Lakota Nation persons to capture and analyze how they talked about their lives and identities. According to her research, individuals who used more first-person pronouns were less likely to mention historical trauma, individuals who mentioned blood quantum as a metric of tribal membership evidenced less cultural embeddedness than those who did not mention blood quantum, and the percentage of Lakota language use was unrelated to either historical trauma or cultural embeddedness.
“Taken together,” Pappenhagen concluded, “these findings have implications for both the ways in which we conceptualize Native identity as well as potential client-patient relationships when working with indigenous persons.”
Read more about the Charles J. Ping Student Community Service Award and the Ohio Campus Compact at ohiocampuscompact.org. Read more about Ohio Wesleyan’s commitment to service at https://www.owu.edu/about/offices-services/community-service-learning/ and more about Pappenhagen’s research at studentsuymposium.owu.edu.
Founded in 1842, Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the nation’s premier liberal arts universities. Located in Delaware, Ohio, the private university offers 86 undergraduate majors and competes in 23 NCAA Division III varsity sports. Ohio Wesleyan combines a challenging, internationally focused curriculum with off-campus learning and leadership opportunities to connect classroom theory with real-world experience. OWU’s 1,750 students represent 46 U.S. states and territories and 43 countries. Ohio Wesleyan is featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” listed on the latest President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction, and included in the U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review “best colleges” lists. Learn more at www.owu.edu.