Professor Brenda J. Child will discuss her ongoing work on American Indian people and their experiences with government boarding schools during the assimilation era, 1879-1933. She will also emphasize that the fifty years when boarding schools dominated Indian education in the US, American Indians experienced one of the largest dispossessions in world history.

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she received the President’s Engaged Scholar Award in 2021. She was Guggenheim Fellow in 2022-23. She was a Nonfiction Judge for the National Book Awards for 2024. Professor Child is the author of several books in American Indian history including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award; and Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012). Her 2014 book My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014) won the American Indian Book Award and Best Book in Midwestern History. She edited a book, Ojibwe and Ocheti Sakowin Artists and Knowledge Keepers (Minnesota, 2024) with Howard Oransky that was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award. She curated an exhibit of the same title that was at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota in January-March 2024. The exhibit marked the opening of the new George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, and Child is the founding director. Her current book project, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country.

Child is the author of a best-selling bi-lingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow (2018), and the forthcoming BlueBearies. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian (2013-18) and was President of the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (2017-18). She was consultant to a major exhibit, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories at the Heard Museum. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-1S71fHKs

Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota. She continues as part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000- member nation. She lives with her husband, the Mille Lacs Ojibwe artist Steven Premo, and family in St. Paul and Bemidji, Minnesota.