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Brenda and Benay Child
stand at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul Campus on
Nov. 5. (photo by Christine T. Nguyen - MPR News)
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Throughout November, MPR News is featuring Indigenous
Minnesotans making history to celebrate Native American Heritage
Month.
Brenda Child says shes always been proud to be Red Lake Ojibwe.
Its something she learned from her mother and strives to pass
on to her two children.
As a historian, Child has studied the day-to-day lives of previous
generations of Ojibwe people, including her own family. She thinks
about how her grandparents spoke the language and harvested wild
rice, but also how hard it must have been for her grandfather to
be dispossessed of his land.
I really take heart from those earlier generations, because
if not for them we wouldn't be here, said the University of
Minnesota professor. We have to honor that, what they went
through, and their own survival.
Child is the author of award-winning books about Native American
history. My
Grandfather's Knocking Sticks draws from her own familys
story.
Born on the Red Lake reservation, Brenda Child says it's also been
important to her to teach her children about the place where theyre
from, their history and culture. And thats not lost on her
20-year-old daughter, Benay Child.
[Shes] really good at helping me understand our family's
history, and how that fits into the broader history of Ojibwe people
in Minnesota, and how I fit into that narrative, said Benay
Child. That's something that I'm always thinking about, even
when I'm not actually thinking about it.
Benay Child is a sophomore at University of Minnesota, where she
is studying Ojibwe language and art. Her goal is to bring the two
majors together and create sculptures inspired by Ojibwe stories.
Editor's note: The following interview has been edited for length
and clarity.
What does it mean to you to be an Indigenous Minnesotan right
now?
Benay Child: As an Indigenous person specifically in the
Twin Cities right now, I would say that that means standing in solidarity
with the Black community and in solidarity with the Black Lives
Matter movement. It means actively listening to the needs of the
community and responding to them.
I think about the protests that I went to for Standing Rock here
in the Twin Cities a few years ago and the Black community was very
clear about showing up for the Indigenous community. I think that's
why it's really important now. They showed up for us and so we have
to show up for them.
Brenda Child: We talk a lot about this idea of Native people
not being seen as modern people. And in fact, some of my work recently
has been organized around that idea. I've been working on history
related to jingle dress dancing, which seems to have emerged around
the time of the global pandemic of influenza a century ago.
One of the things I find interesting about that topic is that people
tend to look at American Indian cultural traditions, even powwow
traditions for example, as being something very ancient or very
old. Aspects of powwows are very old. Aspects of them are new because
powwows, just like Native people, are always evolving.
I find the jingle dress dance tradition a really good example of
this particular idea because it came out of the global pandemic
a century ago. [It] wasn't something that just happened in Indian
Country or Minnesota. It happened in Belgium. It happened in Africa.
It happened in Mexico. And so it's remarkable to think about Native
people as being part of the making of the modern world.
What figures have shaped you into who you are today?
Benay: My mom. I would say all of the experiences that [shes]
provided me, like traveling to different parts of Indian Country
and teaching me our family's history, has been really important
to me. And [she] always reminds me to be a proud Anishinaabekwe.
Brenda: I was also very shaped by my parents. My mother
and father were both very interesting people. I have a lot of my
father's scholarly tendencies and I think I have my mother's crazy
sense of humor.
But I realized that in the work that I do how much I'm shaped by
my grandmother. I'm always talking about her in my written book,
I realized. She was the inspiration for my first book, which is
called Boarding School Seasons. She was the first person
to tell me about going away to a federal boarding school, which
she did in the early 1920s.
I was just writing an essay this week about the jingle dress dance
tradition. Even though I was talking about it in a more abstract
way relating to all Ojibwe people, at the end when I signed my name
I said, I'm the granddaughter of Jeanette Auginash, who was
a jingle dress dancer.
What's your vision for the future generations of Indigenous
people in Minnesota?
Benay: My vision is that everybody speaks Ojibwe, or at
least has the opportunity to go and learn it. Because it's something
that connects us to our ancestors and it's the language that we
use in ceremony.
A few years ago, before I really started learning Ojibwe, I kind
of knew what was going on [during ceremonies]. People help you out
and everything, but it's a lot harder to be fully immersed in the
experience, I think, when you don't understand everything that's
going on. Even after a year of taking classes, I understand a lot
more of what's happening. It's just nice to understand.
Brenda: I'm teaching a class this semester at the university
called Chasing the American Dream. Often we come up
with the idea that parents, especially immigrant parents to the
U.S., want things to be better for the next generation. I was thinking
that's not at all the way Native people imagine the future for the
next generation. Some of this has to do with what our grandparents
experienced, or ancestors, and the way that they lived.
I was just doing some research this past couple of weeks on a woman
named Ellen Red Blanket, who was Ojibwe from the Leech Lake reservation.
She lived in this community out at Bear Island for half the year.
She had a very tough life. It was a time when Native people were
being dispossessed of their land. The influenza pandemic happened
on Bear Island. She lost children in her lifetime.
I had an opportunity to meet with her great-granddaughter this
summer and I said, Well, tell me some of your Ellen Red Blanket
stories. I was expecting her to tell me about the hardship
and she said, She always said that they had the best life.
I thought that was such a wonderful idea because I think of my
grandparents. They spoke Ojibwe. They harvested wild rice. They
harvested maple sugar. They went fishing. They knew our homelands,
even though my grandfather came to Red Lake because he had been
dispossessed of his land at Mille Lacs.
So when I think of what I want for my children [and] what I want
for Benay: I want her to speak her language. I want her to go to
ceremonies. I want her to harvest wild rice and maple sugar. I want
for her what my grandparents had.
ChangeMakers series
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