Last March, three staff members in the Department of American Indian Studies traveled to Hawai’i to observe their full-immersion schools. Potentially implementing elements from full-immersion programs like those in Hawai’i could help facilitate the necessary efforts toward Dakota and Ojibwe language revitalization.

Gabriela Spears-Rico and Jessica Lopez Lyman discuss Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, which comes from the Aztec celebration of loved ones who’ve walked on. It’s now a Mexican holiday with customs and traditions that are catching on in the US—but the American version is often more about sugar skull imagery and less about the original intent. What is the holiday is really about and how do you avoid cultural appropriation?

Carter Meland, a leturer in the Department of American Indian Studies, talks about his first novel, Stories for a Lost Child. The book was one of four finalists for the Minnesota Book Award in the Novel and Short Story category.

The Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Studies Initiative (RIGS) was established in 2015 to support innovative research, teaching, community-building, and engagement for scholars and students addressing issues on these topics. RIGS is dedicated to bringing faculty and students together to pursue lines of inquiry that challenge systems of power and inequality, assert human dignity, and imagine social transformation.

Updates from the department featuring students, faculty, and alumni.

In 1829, Dakota leader Mahpiya Wicasta (Cloud Man) led a group of Dakota men on a hunt. The group became trapped in a blizzard for three days, buried under the snow. He later founded an agricultural community on the site, which he called Ḣeyate Otuŋwe, on the shores of a lake that Dakota people today call Bde Maka Ska. Nearly two centuries later, Cloud Man’s great-great grandchildren led the charge to reclaim the lake’s Dakota name, after having long been named after white secessionist John Caldwell Calhoun.” We don’t call it a change, we call it a restoration,” descendant Katherine Beane says when asked about the renaming of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska.

With as few as 1,000 Native speakers of Ojibwe remaining, preserving the language is more important than ever. It’s “a big effort to not lose who we are; how we view the world is in the language,” says Professor Brendan Fairbanks, who works tirelessly to revitalize the language through teaching, research, and special programming.

Due to rising sea levels, the Pacific Islands are struggling with cultural loss as Natives are forced to relocate. To counteract the potential loss of water practices in Pacific Islander cultures, Professor Vince Diaz is working on three major canoe projects that will work in tandem to maintain and adapt their ancient traditions.

Professor Jean O'Brien has been awarded the Dean's Medalist award for 2018. As a historian and a mentor, one of her goals is to explore and teach the importance of persistence.