Contemporary Indigenous Art and History

The American Historical Review · 2024

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• History

Journal Article Contemporary Indigenous Art and History Get access Brenda J Child Brenda J Child Email: brenda_santos@brown.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 93–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae011 Published: 13 March 2024

Reindeer and the Venice Biennale

The American Historical Review · 2024

• History
• Geography

Journal Article Reindeer and the Venice Biennale Get access Brenda J Child Brenda J Child Brenda J. Child, University of Minnesota, US Email: child011@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 97–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae006 Published: 13 March 2024

Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker

The William and Mary Quarterly · 2022-10-01

Reviewed by: Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker Brenda J. Child Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance. By Heidi Bohaker. Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 283 pages plus plates. Paper, ebook. “What’s your clan?” called out the license registration clerk on the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. I had just arrived at the government center to pick up a new plate for my white Toyota. The old Indian Health Service hospital on the reservation had been converted into an all-purpose building for official business, including meetings of the elected tribal council and hereditary chiefs. “Kingfisher,” I replied to the clerk, though I knew other close family members had Bear clan license plates. My grandmother, Jeanette Jones Auginash, carried the doodem of Kingfisher, or Ogiishkimanisii. She was born near the old village of Ponemah, not far from the site where the ethnologist Frances Densmore set up her equipment in 1910 to record Ojibwe music.1 My grandfather, Fred Auginash, from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, had been so harassed by settlers and the state of Minnesota that his family left their homes for the White Earth Reservation in the early twentieth century. He was a political refugee at White Earth for a time, before he married my grandmother and raised a family at Red Lake. It must have been a lifeline for him to find others in our community who carried the Mawka Doodem, for the Bear. My mother, who was my grandparents’ youngest child, always identified with the Kingfisher Doodem because she had grown up among her mother’s relatives at Red Lake. In 1974, Red Lake became the first reservation in the United States to adopt license plates as a marker of tribal sovereignty, and the state of Minnesota and local authorities challenged the legality of the plates in yet another manifestation of settler colonialism and Indigenous refusal.2 In fact, the designer of the license plates that included the seven doodem at Red Lake made them light blue in order to more closely resemble the state of Minnesota’s, because a Red Lake license plate invited police harassment and the potential for being pulled over when driving off the reservation. [End Page 635] Heidi Bohaker’s Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance demonstrates that the doodem, or clan system of the Anishinaabeg, has always been about political alliance and authority. Clan identity was so important in the Great Lakes that people often devised ways of obtaining one when a doodem was not passed down in a patrilineal line, sometimes by adoption or even by the making of new doodem. Flexibility was built into the system, even though observers and, later, scholars pursued explanations about the “rules” of Indigenous life, rather than seeing how it allowed adaptation to new circumstances. Bohaker points out that even the arrival of Europeans in the Great Lakes did little to alter the system, as the offspring of French men and Anishinaabe women could be adopted into the doodem when there was no patrilineal line to lean on simply by following the practices already in existence when Anishinaabe women married outside of their tribal nations. My grandmother’s Kingfisher Doodem is said to have originated in a marriage long ago between a Dakota man and an Ojibwe woman at Ponemah, an example (noted by Bohaker) of a new doodem formation. Doodem and Council Fire recognizes how deeply Anishinaabeg worldviews incorporated the doodem tradition. Bohaker studied earlier generations of scholars who wrote about it extensively, including William W. Warren in his essential History of the Ojibwe People.3 Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Warren viewed it as a system in decline under the calamity of American settler colonialism. By contrast, Bohaker views it as an enduring force in the Great Lakes, pointing out that Canadian leaders continued to sign with doodem images into the twentieth century. Bohaker makes the interesting point that early Christian settlers and missionaries were offended by an Anishinaabe worldview in which people descended from animals. And it is true that the Anishinaabeg privilege concepts and stories upholding that...

Christianity was a major part of Indigenous boarding schools – a historian whose family survived them explains

2022-07-29

Voice to Vision XVII: We're Also Part of the Making of the Western World

2021

• Political Science
• History
• Political Science

This is the

Narrating Histories of Domestic Violence in Indian Country

2020-01-01

Introduction

UNP - Bison Books · 2020-04-01

The Boarding School as Metaphor

Journal of American Indian Education · 2018-03-01 · 15 citations

37 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 The Boarding School as Metaphor Brenda J. Child For many in our society, the role of parenting was halted by boarding schools. Our great-­ grandparents were prevented from being parents. Both my grandmother and my grandfather were sent away. Then their kids were brought up in a regimented, abusive system of boarding schools. What that system has done to our grandparents, our parents, and then to us and our children is put holes in the fabric of our society. —­ Ingrid Washinawatok-­ El Issa, Women of the Native Struggle: Portraits and Testimony of Native American Women Over the years, thousands of Native children have learned the message that is implicit in boarding school education: that Native people are children of the devil who are condemned by God. This sense of worthlessness, of evil, of unlovability because they were Native was turned inward, internalized, becoming the root for some of the profound dysfunction later in life. —­ Diane Wilson, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life They are something tangible—­ mnemonic benchmarks—­ that, as with sites of Australian Aboriginal mytho-­ geography, one can point to and say "it happened there." A visit to the school can provide a trigger or cue that takes one back to the past almost as if there again—­ a redemptive pilgrimage to an Aboriginal Auschwitz. Perhaps is it all a bit too easy. —­ Michael G. Kenny, "A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History" The JAIE editors appreciate the opportunity to reprint Brenda Child's groundbreaking book chapter "The Boarding School as Metaphor" to anchor this special issue. The chapter has had a profound impact on the field of boarding school history. Child proposes that boarding school has become "a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor for . . . American colonialism at its most genocidal." In her research, including members of her own Red Lake Ojibwe family who attended boarding schools, Child 38 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 was struck by the strength and resilience of Native students and alumni. Stories of homesickness, mistreatment, and abuse were mixed with stories of appreciation, enjoyment, and resistance. Child, like other authors in this special issue, grapples with how to honor that diversity of student experience in the boarding schools while critically engaging with the profound harms done within the schools in the name of so-­ called civilization . She develops a nuanced and respectful analysis that honors the range of alumni perspectives as well as the central position of boarding schools in ongoing debates about historical trauma and its impacts on Native people and communities. The boarding school experience remains a burning historical memory for American Indian people in the United States. This despite the fact that most federal Indian boarding schools closed in the 1930s, or had by then adopted policies that rejected assimilation and were more in tune with contemporary ideas about race and progressive education. While scholarly studies have espoused resistance and resilience in the historical record of students who survived an assimilationist education, boarding school is increasingly conceptualized by many American Indians as a uniquely Native usable past that links tribal people of diverse backgrounds today to a devastating common history, one that must be evoked, many argue, to understand our present conditions and social problems. Boarding school is now the ancestor in a direct genealogical line of terrible offspring—­ alcohol abuse, family and sexual violence, and other social dysfunction. It is not necessarily the job of the historian to explain how Indian people today remember the past. But the intensity with which Indian people in the present day explain and respond to the role of boarding school in the broader history of their families and communities suggests that for many, boarding school is also a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor...

The Boarding School as Metaphor

Journal of American Indian Education · 2018-01-01 · 13 citations

Politically Purposeful Work

University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

This chapter takes as its starting point an oral history project with a number of inspirational Minnesota Ojibwe women who lived and worked in Minneapolis, among them Gertrude Howard Buckanaga, Pat Bellanger, Rose Robinson, and Vikki Howard, who shared stories about their own mentors in the Indian community. It shows how for these activists personal networks with other Indian people were essential to city survival, and their efforts were an expression of indigenous values, and cultural capital, that resulted in the emergence of distinctive urban Indian communities. Women's networks and their invention of unique community formations generated unanticipated opportunities leading to professionalization and higher education not only for themselves.