Canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Duluth, Minnesota, USA. Photo by Lee Vue on Unsplash.
Feature

Learning Together: The Humanities Futures Labs

We wanted to create a new type of Indigenous humanities work for our undergraduate students while also offering a professional development opportunity for our graduate fellows. Our work started in earnest with a two-week summer workshop for the Humanities Futures Lab Graduate Fellows (HFLGF) in 2022. These fellows are graduate students with a variety of disciplinary and personal commitments and experiences that informed our collective work to create these lab courses…

The landscape adjacent to a water blessing by the Indigenous Women's Water Sisterhood. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Feature

Place and Relations Capstone: Indigenizing Education

How can we decolonize the university? For the past four years, Indigenous community members and faculty, staff, and students from the University of Minnesota’s Duluth, Morris, and Twin Cities campuses have developed projects aimed at doing exactly this as part of the Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Initiative, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation…

Northern Minnesota. Image courtesy of Lee Vue.
Feature

Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands

From the Authors: Reflecting on the three years since writing “Where We Stand,” the main thing that we continue to focus on is the need for accountability and reparative action for land theft. Land acknowledgements are even more commonplace than they were in 2020, but they are still often nothing more than nice words, rarely, if ever, accompanied by substantive action. The Daḳota and other Indigenous people want to know what you are willing to give up when you acknowledge you are on someone else’s land. When you give that land acknowledgement, what are you acknowledging exactly? Do you have even the basic knowledge of how the people you name were dispossessed of their land? Do you know the treaties that were used to provide legal justification for that dispossession? The fact that this article continues to be downloaded so frequently, and that we are still frequently asked to present this information to a wide variety of audiences both within and outside of the University of Minnesota, tells us that this knowledge is still far from as common as it should be…

On November 29, 2016, fast food workers around the USA went on strike for a $15/hour wage. About 300 protesters gathered at Coffman Memorial Union and called on the Minneapolis City Council and the University of Minnesota to pass a $15/hour minimum wage for all Minneapolis workers. Image courtesy of Fibonacci Blue via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
Geographies

The College Union: Where Tradition Meets Decolonization on Campus

Higher education has undergone many changes since the first colleges in the old world came to be. Institutions of higher learning respond to societal pressures and needs, which means that education is ever evolving and dependent on the social context in which institutions find themselves. However, there is no denying that the first institutions of higher learning were not welcoming places for people not of the elite classes. These institutions were, and are, places where the education of future leaders has been the premier goal (Cohen and Kisker 2010). To achieve this goal, institutions of higher learning have employed a mixture of curricular, extra-curricular, and co-curricular tools…

Robin Wall Kimmerer and Diane Wilson in conversation. Photo: Rebecca Slater, by Rebecca Studios.
In Review

Indigenous Wisdom: Re-story-ation to Resist, Resurge, and Inspire

I was fortunate to attend an in-person conversation between two Indigenous scholar-authors, Diane Wilson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium on May 17th, 2022 (Kimmerer and Wilson 2022). In this column, I share part of my reflections and stories as an Indigenous scientist inspired by Robin and Diane’s conversation, specifically Robin’s emphasis on the importance of healing our relationships with the land and nonhuman relatives, and the need for “Re-story-ation” of the land. As I understand it, re-story-ation means to return our stories to the land and to remember how to hear the stories the land tells…

Wild rice growing in northern Minnesota. Image via Superior National Forest, (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Perspectives

Data Science in Indian Country

At the end of July 2022, some 150 individuals from across the country gathered at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities for “Data Science in Indian Country,” the Fifth Geoscience Alliance Conference since 2010. Founded by Dr. Nievita Bueno Watts of  California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt), Prof. Anthony Berthelote of Salish Kootenai College, and Dr. Diana Dalbotten of the University of Minnesota’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, the Geoscience Alliance (GA) is a coalition of students, educators and staff, Indigenous community members, and others committed to broadening the participation of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and people of Native Hawai’ian ancestry in the geosciences…

University research has a legacy of doing harm to Indigenous communities. However, a new collaborative project is showing how research can be done in a better and inclusive way. (Shutterstock)
Primary Sources

Collaborative Indigenous Research

Collaborative Indigenous Research is a way to repair the legacy of harmful research practices A recent disclosure from Harvard’s Peabody Museum has brought attention, yet again, to the need to rethink the relationships between universities and Indigenous communities. Recently, the Peabody Museum announced that it has been holding locks of hair collected throughout the 1930s from more than 700 Indigenous children forced into residential boarding schools in the U.S…

The Hiawatha Wampum Belt, depicting the five original nations of the Haudenosaunee and their interconnections.
Teaching and Practice

Teaching Indigenous Epistemologies at the University of Minnesota

It has been argued that the twin ongoing and overarching crises facing students in higher education today are the urgencies of calls for justice and the threats from a changing climate. Indeed, these are inextricably intertwined. Students will face them no matter what their profession, or however they find themselves living as a citizen in the world. As Vicente Diaz reminds us so eloquently in his contribution to this collection, “the epistemological system on which our present political, economic, and cultural existences are based is unsustainable. We need radically different ways of defining what it means to be human, of understanding human-ness in relations of kinship and reciprocity, and of understanding and respecting the living world around us.”…

Fortney Farm in Soldiers Grove. Image courtesy of Tim Hundt
Feature (Peer Review)

Storying the Floods: Experiments in Feminist Flood Futures

By Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Margot Higgins, Tamara Dean, Eric G. Booth, and Rebecca Lave. Life in Wisconsin’s Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds, the focus of our Driftless work, has been punctuated by major floods in 2007, 2008, 2016, 2017, and the worst in recorded history in 2018. As flooding becomes more frequent and more severe across these watersheds, community members are working together to re-imagine ways to live well together with worsening floods.