Waziyatawin Angela Wilson

"Genocide in Your Back Yard"

Waziyatawin Angela Wilson is a Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Cornell University in 2000 and spent seven years teaching in the history department at Arizona State University. After earning tenure and an associate professorship at ASU, she left the academy in 2007 to work as an independent scholar.

Waziyatawin is the author of Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives (University of Nebraska Press, 2005) and co-editor of Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) and For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (School of America Research Press, 2005). Her most recent volume, In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors (St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2006), is an edited collection that tells the stories, both in words and pictures, of the Dakota Death Marches of 1862 and the commemorative walks that have been held in recent years to honor the memory of those Dakota people who endured the 1862 forced removals. That volume was the recipient of the 2007 Independent Publisher’s Silver Book Award for Adult Multicultural Non-fiction.

Waziyatawin’s interests include projects centering around Indigenous decolonization strategies such as truth-telling and reparative justice, the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, and the development of liberation ideology in Indigenous communities. She is currently living, working and writing on her home reservation with her husband and three children.

Dr. Waziyatawin will provide a historical overview of the genocidal practices implemented in Minnesota, the homeland of the Dakota Nation. Not only do Minnesotans not acknowledge this painful legacy, they also continue to celebrate all that was gained as a consequence of genocide while glorifying its perpetrators. The primary question posed at the conclusion of this presentation will be “What Does Recognition of Genocide Demand?”