Wallenberg Memorial LectureOctober 9, 2023 at 7–8:15 p.m.

WALLENBERG MEMORIAL LECTURE 2023

Sponsored by Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies

BOARDING SCHOOLS AND AMERICAN INDIAN DISPOSSESSION

Brenda J. Child, Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota

Description of talk: Brenda J. Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) explores the history of government boarding schools and their role in American Indian dispossession, including her own family's experiences during the assimilation era.

Biography of Speaker: Brenda J. Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. In 2021, she was the University of Minnesota’s recipient of the President’s Community Engaged Scholar Award. She was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Child is the author of several award-winning books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998); Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012); and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014). The latter won the American Indian Book Award. Her new book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World: Ojibwe People and Pandemics (2020). She also authored a bilingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow. It won a major prize, the American Indian Youth Literature Medal.

Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota and is part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000-member nation.