Teaching the history of a nation from a single perspective neglects the experiences, hardships, and triumphs faced by groups that don’t fall within the majority. Associate Professor Jimmy Patiño worked with Minneapolis Public Schools to create a Chicano and Latino history course to address this issue and pass down knowledge to the next generation of scholars.

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.

The Native Artist Talk Series, hosted by the Department of American Indian Studies, features Native American artists and provides a platform for discourse about modern Native American identities, creating opportunities for engagement between students, University alumni, faculty, and the Twin Cities community.

In a collaborative interview, feminist studies PhD students, Caitlin Gunn, Naimah Petigny, Nithya Rajan, and José Manuel Santillana, discuss what constitutes feminist engagement and the multitude of sociopolitical factors that make it necessary in the current political times.