Bowie Resident Interns at Smithsonian Museum

Related Media

St. Mary’s College of Maryland student Victoria Danner ’12 (left) with her internship mentor Dr. JoAllyn Archambault, who is director of the North American Indian Program at the Smithsonian.

ST. MARY'S CITY, MD (11/17/2011)(readMedia)-- Victoria Danner, a student at St. Mary's College of Maryland and resident of Bowie, didn't think she had much of a chance when she applied to be a Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) Intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

"I applied almost as a joke to myself because an internship with the Smithsonian is like the Holy Grail for a student in the social sciences and the list of previous interns were all from Ivy League schools," she said. "No one was going to pick a student from a little liberal arts college like [St. Mary's]."

When Danner received her acceptance letter on April Fools' Day, she was sure it was a cruel prank. "I had all but forgotten about the internship because I was so convinced I wasn't going to get it," she said. "I was even more grateful when I learned later during the internship that I was one of 18 students out of a total of 350 applicants that were selected for the program. That blew me away. I knew it was competitive, but it didn't hit me until [I heard] the statistics."

As an NHRE intern, Danner spent her summer looking at Native American stereotypes in popular culture. Her mentor was the director of the American Indian Program at the National Museum of Natural History, Dr. JoAllyn Archambault, and Danner worked with Archambault's private collection of artifacts. She spent most days measuring the artifacts and entering them into a database with an identification number, a description, and a photograph.

"The purpose of the project was to examine how ethnic stereotyping persists in our culture through popular media and public imagination," Danner said. While people are generally aware of the prevalence of stereotypes about African American and Asian communities, less information has been paid to the Native American community.

One of the most exciting parts of Danner's internship was when she participated in a touring exhibit at the Museum of Natural History called "Race." Danner gave a public presentation where she asked people what they pictured when they thought of Native Americans. Many mentioned Tipis, horses, and Pocohontas, which, according to Danner, are all from between 1500 and 1800 and based on depictions of Native Americans in 19th century popular media. "I even talked about [the] Twilight [book series] in my presentation and its use of old stereotypes in the Quiluete Indians," she said. "Many people were shocked to find that the Quiluete were a real, federally recognized tribe."

Danner plans to continue presenting and wants to study stereotypes in graduate school as she works towards a PhD. "We don't realize something is a stereotype unless we are directly confronted by it, because it has been ingrained into our minds from an early age," she said. In the future, Danner wants to study the impacts of stereotypes, how they apply to individuals of societies, and how they change over time.

###

St. Mary's College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. More than 2,000 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary's River in Southern Maryland.