“Teaching at OSU is not my career. It’s not how I pay the bills. It’s not. Been there for over 20 years, but I wasn’t aspiring to be a teacher at OSU. It just happened, they asked me to do it,” says Jan Looking Wolf Reibach, Senior Instructor I for MUS 109 – Native American Flute. 

He explains that he started off, “lecturing from my reservation, I was walking a very traditional path, and I was dancing regalia and doing drum making, and I was doing a lot of cultural lectures at Oregon State as a guest presenter.” 

Jan explains how he started to win a bunch of awards for his flute playing and then he started to teach children on his reservation how to play the flute.

“And then there was this OSU professor by the name of Dr. Kirk Peters. He was the ethnic studies co chair and I was lecturing in his class. And he found out I was teaching the flute at the reservation, and he came out to one of my workshops, and afterwards he approached me.” 

Peters asked him if he would be interested in bringing that experience of the flute playing with the children on the reservation to OSU in a culturally appropriate way. 

“We worked with the music department, people from the liberal arts and ethnic studies, and we designed the first course as an experiment that would be offered through oral tradition. So it would have indigenous principles of oral tradition be based in experience and learning how to play that instrument and then learning how to express yourself with it and the history of it.” 

He says, “from the first class, I fell in love with it, and I was like, wow, it’s just very special. And I really enjoyed it, started as an experiment and here we are. 20,000 students later, have taken the class over 20 years.” 

He notes that this is his first time in those 20 years that he is now offering the class only one section per term, due to the fact that he is now retired from full time teaching, to be a part time instructor. 

He explains that because of this, the class filled up so fast that they had to make a deal to raise the amount of space/student size from 200 to 270 students. “It feels good to have one night a week to be able to dial in on a group and connect with them. And I feel very grateful to be able to do that.”

He says, “I plan on doing that the rest of my life. I really do. Going to part time for me was to make it sustainable as I get older, you know, I’m going to be 60 this year.” 

“For me, it’s an hour, over an hour drive each way to campus. And the one thing I’m really proud of is I taught those classes for 22 years and I was never late to a class. And my other place that I lived, I was an hour and a half away going through traffic, and was never even one minute late to one classroom. Never missed a class in 20 years. I never missed a class. And I’m really proud of that. I’m proud that I was able to do that.” 

He goes on to say, “I love my students. It’s an amazing experience to sit in there with them and have all that diversity in the classroom, and everybody feels so empowered, you know, it’s just really incredible.” 

“My music is what set our life up here. And over that same period of time, I did 30 commercial albums, and I did some movie soundtracks, and I was very blessed in my own personal music career. I actually wrote the song for OSU 150 for the university and recorded it, I scored that and created that song for them. For OSU’s 150th celebration a few years back. It’s called ‘A Special Place’ and you can see that on YouTube when I performed it for President Ray with the choirs.” 

He also talks about how he sits, “on the Native American advisory, the longhouse advisory board, and I’m on the Indigenous Studies Advisory Committee. So I’ve been involved, even though I’m not a career instructor, you know, and I did it out of love for that. I really feel like Oregon State is a very, very special place.” 

He emphasizes that in over the 20 plus years he’s worked with the administration within the College of Liberal Arts he says that, “they really do care about the experience of their students. It’s not just a talking point. Oregon State cares about diversity, and they want it for their students, and they want it to be a safe place, and they want it to be a place where students can be themselves and can experience, you know, not have to sacrifice who they are to get their education.”

“I think that as a Native American elder, I really relate to equality, to the importance of diversity, and through that recognition that we are all equal because the Creator made us that way, we’re not equal because somebody says we are.” 

Jan says that his home is Oregon State. He mentions how he has done lectures and presentations at other colleges such as University of Oregon, Portland State, Willimette, and Western Oregon University, but Oregon State is special to him and he is committed to it. 

“People ask me all the time, they’re like, ‘well you’re gonna have a moment in your life when you retire’ and I’m like, into what? Like, I get to go down and be with students once a week. It’s perfect, you know, it’s a perfect situation to be part of.”

He says that, “attendance in my class is very important. It’s an attendance and participation course. It’s accredited, and of course … it includes all the required assessments and student learning outcomes and all of that, but all of that stuff aside, attendance and participation, in order to get the experience out of my class.” 

Jan recommends to students who are interested in the class to, “register quickly, because it filled up by week nine of last term, it was already full for this term.” 

When asked about what he would tell students who might be on the fence about joining his class he responded by saying, “I wouldn’t try to convince them to take my class. What I would tell them is, find something that they connect to, try new things in the arts, and find a way of oral tradition, which what I mean by that, find a way to express their feelings in some very personal way that they connect to.” 

He says to, “find something and learn something new and try new things, because unless they expose themselves to it, unless they try it, they may not understand, they may not discover that they connect to it. Try different forms of self expression, and then always follow the first rule to expressing yourself, which is the universal rule for all human beings, is in order for us to experience full expression, we must first connect with ourself. We must go through the process of connecting with ourself.” 

“My encouraging word to them would be like, no musical experience is necessary at all. And all the students that have taken this class will experience music, and no one’s ever singled out.” 

For those who may not be able to take the class or have already fulfilled this requirement, there is a Native American Flute club that is going through the process of being started, about 20 students have come together to form it and Jan Looking Wolf Reibach is going to be the advisor for the club. 

To get more of an inside scoop about Jan Looking Wolf Reibach check out this PBS Documentary about the class, visit this website about his Biography and Lifetime Achievement Award, or watch the A Special Place Performance that he mentioned earlier in this story.