Boarding schools and American Indian education

Jason Schlender: Welcome to Indigenized Connections On Air, a podcast brought to you by the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Community Vitality in the area of leadership and civic engagement, and also by the Minnesota Indigenous Leadership Network, which explores the issues that impact tribal communities and leadership throughout Minnesota. I'm your host, Jason Schlender, and I'm the American Indian leadership and civic engagement educator.

My guest today is from the Red Lake Nation, and is a respected author, scholar and lecturer in the area of American Indian history. Please welcome Dr. Brenda Child to the podcast. So here today with Dr. Brenda Child.

What's your motivation for writing Boarding School Seasons?

Dr. Brenda Child: So I began doing my work on the history of American Indian boarding schools for a number of reasons, but my number one reason is really my grandmother's influence, she was a student at the Flandreau School in the 1920s, and her dad had attended, not Flandreau, but the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania.

And so when I was growing up, she always had this photograph of this Indian football team on her wall, kind of like a collage, and I knew that in the center of this photograph was Jim Thorpe, and then a couple of people down with my great-grandfather from Ponemah, Minnesota, and whose English name was David Jones. And I knew this photograph had something to do with boarding school, but I never really understood what because they always looked like they were too old to be students and what does this have to do with Carlisle and boarding school? So was that really that kind of launched me.

And I came to learn that that photograph was a photograph of the Oorang Indian football team in Ohio during the 1920s, organized by Thorp, mostly composed of former students he knew from Carlisle and that was an early team and development of professional football in the United States. So most people are not aware of the important role that Thorpe and American Indians had in the early years of professional football in the United States.

So that kind of launched me. And then when I decided to go to graduate school, and I was always someone inclined to studying history, even when I was an undergraduate of the Bemidji State and I’m up at Bemidji today. At that time, it was my feeling as well as the feeling of many other people that American Indians had been kind of left out of the narrative of American Indian history, and I wanted when I decided to go to graduate school and get a PhD in history, I wanted to write history from the perspective of Native people, and I knew my grandmother's kind of life story didn't fit with what the historians had said about boarding schools up to that time.

That is Native people went off, they had the haircut, they were forced to become Christians, they were forced to do all sorts of things, they became confused about their identity, they went home and never really knew who they were anymore. They were kind of a lost generation, and I thought, wow, that doesn't sound like Red Lake people, that doesn't sound like my grandmother, who continued to speak Ojibwe, married a man, my grandfather, who only spoke Ojibwe, raised all their children, including my mother to speak Ojibwe.

So I thought there's more to this boarding school story that I've been hearing from historians, so I went into the national archives with the idea of trying to recover Native people, talking about their experiences of school

Jason Schlender: [There were] recent findings of some mass graves up in British Columbia. How did that even happen? What led to that discovery?

Dr. Brenda Child: So I would have to kind of declare that I've never really done any work on Canada, but I'll talk about some differences between boarding schools in the US and Canada. But I do have a good colleague, when I began doing my work on boarding schools years ago, one of the first people in Canada to have written about Native people's experiences at the school, was the scholar named Celia Haig-Brown, who I'm still in contact with, who's up at York University in Toronto. And so she had done work with former students and oral histories, and I always had this sense that the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia had a very terrible history because students talked about abuse and violence, sexual abuse, and how they were treated if they spoke their language.

So my sense was that was always a very harsh school. But what I will say about the US and Canada, lately, I've been trying to talk to folks about what some of the differences are in the US and Canada, is that in the United States, now some people, Indians, for reasons of their own, went to mission schools. But it was really the government boarding schools that started with Carlisle, that were the first off-reservation government boarding schools.

The missionary organizations were not funded by the US government. The US government created their own system of off-reservation federal boarding schools, starting with Carlisle in 1879, and the last one established was the Riverside School, the Sherman Institute out in Riverside, California. That continued for a number of years.

Carlisle closed down in 1918. But what happened in the United States is after about 50 years, and really before that, when you think of the ideas policymakers had. People turned away from the boarding school concept in the US, and so since FDR, so think the 1930s, and think of your family who were young going to school in the 1930s, that's really the last boarding school generation.

Many of them went to boarding school in that era because of the poverty of Indian families during the Great Depression, and people in Washington wanted to close down the schools. Ironically, Indian demand for the institutions, and the 30s kept the light on for another decade. So since the 30s, the United States policy has been to integrate American Indians into public schools. So that's the big story of Indian education in the 20th century as public school education.

But in Canada, they continued with residential boarding schools for another 50 years. So most of us, Indians quit going to boarding schools in the 30s or the schools that continued, it had very different policies than Carlisle in the 19th century, and so that's one of the big differences is that the residential schools continued for another half-century after we discontinued them essentially, in the United States. They were no longer the primary way of educating Indians. The other difference and this would be the story of Kamloops, is that in Canada, the federal government farmed out Indian education to church organizations.

So 70% of the Indian people in Canada who went to a residential school, it was the school run by the Catholic Church, or the Anglican Church or other Protestant denominations. And so in the US, we had a separate system that the federal government operated, run by the Indian service, and we did not farm out education to church organizations in the United States. To me, in a lot of ways, the stories from Canada about violence and sexual abuse resonate more closely with stories we've heard about Catholic schools and other stories of other children abused within church-run organizations

The other thing to keep in mind about the Boarding School Era, which I get from Carlisle up to FDR. So if you think 50 years in the US is when boarding schools dominated, it was also an era of tuberculosis, and it was also the era of the big influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which is different than the pandemic we have now, which tends to be deadly to older people. In 1918-19, it was younger people who were vulnerable to that particular virus, so a lot of young people died, and I've talked in other settings about how the jingle dress dance tradition was created in the aftermath of the pandemic of 1918-19, because so many Ojibwe people died.

This was true of boarding schools as well. There was kind of a communal environment of living together in the dormitories, there was no real cure for, well, I mean, the influenza was a viral illness, but tuberculosis was a bacterial illness, and there wasn't until the development of antibiotics more the mid-20th century people languished for a long time with that disease.

What we see in the US is that many Indian children died of tuberculosis. In boarding school records, what I see are pretty good records of children who died in the sense that superintendents, heads of schools, parents were often communicating with one another through letters when a child was ill. Parents were very engaged. They knew and they worried about their children at boarding school, so there was a kind of constant flow of information between the schools and reservation communities.

But when sometimes a child then grew very ill beyond what the school felt they could handle, the children were sometimes transferred to TB sanitariums. There was a big one in Toledo, outside of the Taimah Indian community in Iowa. They went there or they were sent home if they were gravely ill, and so a lot of the boarding school correspondence is about children ill with tuberculosis. There were some schools who maintained cemeteries, however.

So if you've ever visited Haskell, I always find it very moving to go to the school cemetery there.

Jason Schlender: Do you find in your research, and maybe with your own, do you assert that there was a high number of the epidemic, whether it was to influence or a tuberculosis, that it kind of really impacted the rural communities too?

Dr. Brenda Child: Well, it did impact rural communities, so aside from the boarding school issue of children with contagious diseases like tuberculosis, there was a tremendous problem. I always think where smallpox ended up, tuberculosis took up in the 19th century, and that became the biggest killer for Native people. So you probably know, Jason, thinking about kind of the history of Ojibwe people in the Great Lakes that we often talk about the decline of the bison and the economic impact on tribes on the northern plains in the late 19th century, but the low point for a Ojibwe people in our population was actually the teens, like the early after 1910, that decade, and that's when Ojibwe people and the Great Lakes experienced their greatest population low, before we began the recovery that we've seen in the 20th century and in recent decades.

And so that was … some of it was Indians in boarding school, but it was also just the poor health, the poverty and the loss of economic ways that Ojibwe people were experiencing in the early 20th century. The other point I like to make about boarding schools is that people sometimes don't understand the why boarding schools existed in the first place.

Why did Carlisle start? We know that Carlisle kind of educated the children of American Indian prisoners of war. So the Apache children, their whole families were incarcerated in St. Augustine, Florida, and some of those children were the first to arrive at Carlisle. The same was true of the Lakota students that came on trains to Carlisle. Those families, those communities had been actively engaged in military resistance against the United States and the reservation system. So that's kind of the first boarding school generation.

But as time goes on, in this 50-year period that I sort of describe as the Boarding School Era, it's also the time of the General Allotment Act. And you know that that is the time in the Great Lakes and across Indian Country when many of us, especially Ojibwe people, were dispossessed of our land. The federal government wanted us to move to private landholding. And all of the changes of the Allotment Act in the Allotment Era undermined our traditional systems of land tenure.

So the boarding schools were about allotting Indian reservations. That was the end goal of boarding schools. Boarding schools were just the place to re-educate children for a new future where they wouldn't live like their parents and grandparents anymore, but they would no longer live on the land. They needed to be trained in industrial jobs and American occupations and speak English because they weren't going to live on some tribal homeland as their ancestors had.

And that's why boarding schools existed. So we talk about the cultural assimilation in all this, but the cultural assimilation is kind of the rhetoric, almost a kind of humanitarian rhetoric. The way people thought of it at the time, you Indians, you're going to become citizens of the US and enter American society and all this, but it's really about dispossessing Indians, and that's what I see as the genocide of the Boarding School Era. It's this massive dispossession that corresponded with the 50 years that government boarding schools existed. So in the 1930s, allotment comes to an end. The big land grab had already taken place.

Now, you can send Indians to public school. Right, there was very little opposition to sending Indians to public school in the US, because the boarding school agenda was about just dispossessing Indians of their land, and once that had taken place, Indians can go to public school. They can be bilingual, they can practice their spiritual traditions, because Indians are no longer the threat. The language and the culture are no longer threatening to the United States because the big land grab had already happened.

So that's why historians continue to be a little manic about periodization, but I really think it's important for us to understand boarding schools dominated Indian education for a half-century, the same time that the post-allotment turmoil was taking place, and then it kind of dwindles away as a big influence in Native people's lives.

Jason Schlender: I think it's interesting you bring that up too, because one of the things I think about it, as far as the roles that historians play, I think they resort to historians to kind of help them make sense of what's happening, what's happening now, what happened in the past, so that we can kind of make sense of what's going on.

So, and again, getting back into all these things that are happening, there's been a resurgence of people nowadays that are saying that, yeah, my grandparents or my great-grandparents were in boarding schools, asking questions about things that they may have not have thought about for a long time. So do you think it has reopened a wound there?

Dr. Brenda Child: I think it has reopened a conversation about boarding schools for sure. And I think people kind of need to know their history, and that boarding schools were not an end in themselves in the part of the federal government. It was about getting control of tribal real estate, that's why boarding schools existed. I don't think people, otherwise.

Why didn't we assimilate everybody, we were trying to assimilate? Why weren’t there Chinese boarding schools? We wanted to assimilate Chinese people, we didn't want them to speak Chinese, we wanted them to become Americans, right? But there was a unique system of segregated education that evolved in the late 19th century and early 20th century for American Indians alone in the United States. That was because of the land that Indian people have.

And so the boarding schools, it sounds funny to say, but it was a way for policymakers and humanitarians to kind of feel better about themselves. They thought, we're going to uplift Indians, you're going to become citizens, you're going to enter American society on an equal footing. We're going to give you this education, you'll learn trades, you'll graduate, you'll get jobs, but underneath it all ... that's just the rhetoric. Underneath it all were these land policies of dispossession that operated at the same time.

So I always say to my students, You can look at what people said they were going to do for Indians, but you have to really look at what was going on at the same time, right? What are, in fact, the policies? Were Indians better off in the 1930s, and they had been a century ago ... Half-century before, no, they were poor. White Earth lost over 90% of their land during the post-Allotment years that boarding schools existed, very many similar stories of land loss in Wisconsin among Ojibwe people there too. So that's what's behind this rhetoric of assimilating, uplifting Indians.

From a native perspective, I'll have to say this, Jason, as well, what I've come to notice is that for the most part, the generation who lived through the Boarding School Era have now passed away. When I was even doing my research in graduate school, when I was in my 20s, decades ago when I was a young person, my grandmother was already in her 80s, who had been to school at Flandreau. I talked to a man at Red Lake, Dan Nedum, I'm looking at a pipe he carved on my desk. He was the oldest person at Red Lake who had been to Carlisle and was in his 90s when I was in grad school. And I talked to him about his experience of school.

So that is becoming kind of a distant memory, and once that generation passed away, who actually went to boarding schools during the assimilation era. I'm not talking about post-assimilation era schools, you know, the Phoenix Indian school continued for decades. We still had some boarding schools, but they were different institutions than they were during the half-century of assimilation.

But what I see today, and maybe this is how we're making sense of things, I argue that Indian people today use boarding school as kind of a metaphor for what I would call colonialism. That we say, Wow, why do you have all these social problems, why are you guys poor ... why does this problem exist? Why aren't you better parents?

We can all say, Well, it was boarding school. This is when we lost our language, this is when these terrible things happened, we're separated from our families. And what I believe is that there were many different complicated things happening, including a massive dispossession during the Boarding School Era, and it's maybe easier, so boarding school has become to the present generation, somewhat symbolic, like the Trail of Tears, the Massacre at Sand Creek, or the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

It kind of sums up a lot of the tragedy of what happened to American Indians. It's come to symbolize the worst aspects of government policy toward Indians. Just like those other advance, there were many episodes of removal, but we talk about the Trail of Tears, we don't talk about the Ho Chunks, and their complicated stories of being removed from Wisconsin as much, because this other one symbolizes what a lot of tribes went through, and so that becomes the big story.

And I think boarding school has become somewhat of a metaphor that Indian people use today to describe what I would call colonialism, and its colonialism is part boarding school, but it's part Allotment Act. It's part dispossession, it's part all of those ways that my grandfather, who was from Mille Lacs and took an allotment when they were forced out of Central Minnesota and took his allotment at White Earth, which he later lost through non-payment of taxes. That's a complicated story for most of us to unpack.

Dispossession, allotment, land loss, and the post-Allotment era, but maybe we can kind of sum it all up as boarding school. So sometimes I think American Indians, when they say boarding school, are talking very specifically about the boarding school policies, the history of our Indian schools, or ancestors who attended them, but sometimes they might be talking about a broader set of colonial circumstances that worked against the well-being of Indian people during that same half-century.

Jason Schlender: One thing I would add to is when I think about boarding schools and how they've impacted just my family in general, I would just say that it's ... I agree, and I like what you say about how it's a metaphor for colonialism, but I think it's also there's just a long time of silence of nothing being shared. But for me, personally, I was afraid to ask my grandmother about her past experiences because border schools were always how I learned them, where it's just a long history of just abuse and things like that. So I'm like, I'm not going to ... my grandma has lived a hard enough life, why do I want to go back and ask her to revisit those things, and so ...

And she had a different experience, so she was sent to Janesville, which was the Janesville School of the Blind, but she had trachoma, so she was sent. So all her siblings were split up. Some went to the Hayward Boarding School in Hayward, Wisconsin, some went down to Tomah, and then some went to Pipestone. And then my recollection of how I remember it is my family primarily grew up in Milwaukee, and so coming back from my reservation down to Milwaukee was a lot of summer trips back and forth, and my grandma would always stick her middle finger out the window, as we drove through Tomah down 94, and I would see that and then I and I reach over the seat, talk to my dad and I'd say, “Dad, grandma just stuck her middle finger out!,” trying to be as quiet as I could.

So I don't want to alert my grandma or just let her know what I saw, and so my dad would say, tell me about it later. That's what he would tell me. And then he told me about his uncles, his aunties that went to this school on Tomah, his uncle Bernard Manny as we knew him, or as they knew him, succumbed to tuberculosis and so that was my grandma's baby brother, so that was kind of like how things were kind of pieced together later on, but then my grandma went to the Janesville School of the Blind and I don't know if she had a similar experience, so I'm thinking ...

Dr. Brenda Child: Yeah, it's hard to know. And I know from reading one of the most moving memoirs, I think is Peter Razor's book, While the Locust Slept, which talks about his experience. He was Ojibway and talked about his experience in the Owatonna School for Orphans in Southern Minnesota. And it's the worst narrative I've ever read, it's so devastating. When he talked about the brown kids, I don't think anybody had a great experience at the orphanage, but he said that [it was worst for] the brown kids. He said he was more than once beaten to unconsciousness as a child at the orphanage. So regardless of the kind of institutions, we know that families in our communities protect children, and that when children leave their families and communities, they're vulnerable out in the world, regardless of the kind of institution that that they were sent. And trachoma was also a terrible problem of the Boarding School Era, again, another bacterial disease, not treated until sulfa drugs were introduced in the late 1930s, and Trachoma was almost strictly in Indian health problem in the United States. And boarding schools suffered, students suffered with that which could resolve in blindness if it was untreated and there was no good treatment until antibiotics and sulfa drugs, and so that was a problem in public health physicians in the United States identify in boarding schools, the communal atmosphere of boarding schools, as the source of the Trachoma epidemic on reservations.

Jason Schlender: When my grandma had it, I guess she was legally blind and then...but she was also a passive bilingual speaker of Ojibwe. I found that out later in my life because as I was mentioning, I was afraid to ask her anything, but one time we were having a ceremony at our house and I passed my grandma and I said (this is just before she passed away in 2000) I said, “Do you understand what he's saying?” And she's like, “Yeah, I can understand.” And I was amazed by that. I was like, I didn't think she understood Ojibwe, or speak or anything like that. And she looked at me and she said, she goes, “Yeah, I understand Ojibwe completely. I just don't know how to talk anymore.” And then that's the moment where I was motivated to start learning Ojibwe for myself, and so then, it was right after that that I started, I was with my dad and we saw Anton’s book, Living Our Language, and so my dad gave me a challenge, he says, “So you're motivated now to learn how to speak Ojibwe.”

I would say, yeah, yeah, I want to do this. And obviously, a lot more resources, I think as far as from elders. A lot of our elders alive back then. And so my dad issued me this challenge, he says, Well, I want to see you not just read the English side of this book, I want you to understand more of the Ojibwe written side of it. So I was like, Okay, so then that was part of my initial challenge in getting into it, because as a kid, there were so many elders that I just kind of took it for granted, like I'll just wait till they translate and then I can understand what's going on, and I tell my kids nowadays and I tell other people I work with, I was like, oh man, I wasted such a great opportunity because I just didn't understand, I guess, you know the important...

Dr. Brenda Child: I feel that way too about my grandmother and I read like when I was growing up, we somewhat took for granted all the people who spoke Ojibwe. Now I wish I could go back and it wasn't like I wasn't interested, but now we know the intense amount of time, I could have just moved in with Grandma, right?

Right. Spoke Ojibwa full-time instead of just the way, you know, but we're not smart enough as kids to understand all those things and that's a regret, I guess, that I have as well. So let me ask you. I think one of the things that Haaland tries to do is to think about how the United States atones for boarding school. This half-century that I'm saying is worse in a sense then we sometimes described because it's not just about vulnerable children in institutions far away from home, but it's this massive dispossession that goes hand-in-hand with a boarding school policy. So what would we say if someone is saying, Well, how can the government make up for this now?

Jason Schlender: You're asking me that question?

Dr. Brenda Child: I am. Because we're going to have to answer because I think that's what Haaland is going to ask tribes, how do you want to go forward and thinking about government boarding schools? And I'll tell you what I would say as a Red Laker, that we didn't go through a lot, but, but we lost the upper portion of our lake to the eastern portion of upper Red Lake. Some of that now is a state park. Why don't we get that back? It's not dispossessing anyone.

Jason Schlender: Well, I think what ... it kind of goes back to what you're saying, it's like claiming what has taken? So you would say, “well, all this, because I've heard that they plan on taking ground-penetrating radar and going through some of these older schools and trying to see if there is any graves, but just like what you're saying too, and understanding more of the complexities and like what is underneath the rhetoric, right?

What means more to us than anything is just getting our land back and getting re-possession of some of these things as we think it's important to stress that as our governments become a little bit more autonomous and more through gaming and through a lot of our different initiatives, how we've diversified, how we've asserted ourselves, that we have a lot more economic power to assert that.

So one thing I wouldn't want to do is have the option to purchase our land back. I don't think that's fair. So it's like, Well, sure, you can have all these parcels, but they belong to so and so, or some company. I would say that one step in the right direction is to start land repatriation and having the tribes have control over some of those areas. I know there's been talks of some of the national parks of having the tribes being more of those in that control.

That would be the case with Upper Red Lake, which I say part of it is parkland now, and you wouldn't dispossess anyone to have that return to Red Lake because it's ours, it was illegally taken in the 19th century. So I think what I would urge folks, Indian folks now, is to ... if someone's going to say, just like maybe with the George Floyd moment that we had. Well, how can we atone for that?

How can we atone for boarding schools? We should think about the losses of the Boarding School Era and the ways that Indian people paid for that dispossession of the Boarding School Era. So it's more than just a cultural loss, it's a physical land, economic policy, the United States pursued to dispossess Indians, and we have to re-connect that story to the story of boarding schools to really understand what happened in that half-century.

So I'm a boarding school [scholar], someone who writes about the history of Indian education, but I've always seen that we have to see the big picture of that era, and not just a boarding school, because boarding school went hand-in-hand with another policy.

Jason Schlender: Do you think there should be more of an investment in language revitalization as well?

Dr. Brenda Child: I kind of see that that's taking place already, that there need to be more resources devoted into that, but some people have suggested to me is the way to atone for this terrible Indian education system is through educational measures. So someone said to me that, well, why do Indians need to pay tuition at our state universities, that may be a way to atone for it, or it could be more money that goes into language programs around the United States, more resources, but I would like to see tribes be part of that conversation now. Now, we know the Boarding School Era losses. I think from my perspective regarding the ... I feel like the story is pretty well documented in the US.

Yes, we know that Indian children died. I see those stories in boarding school letters, I see the stories of families, I've known this for decades, it's not a new story to me, but now how do we move forward as it's becoming a national conversation that it really wasn't before, and that's where I think tribes need to think very seriously about how they're going to participate in this conversation? I know Indian children died at boarding school, I know many of their names. Now, how does the United States atone for this history?

Jason Schlender: Have you heard of where Secretary Haaland at with her initiative, moving that forward?

Dr. Brenda Child: I haven't heard that much about it, about what's going on, but my sense is she's raising the issue, she's starting a conversation, and now she wants tribes to respond, and so that's what I would be encouraging is just a conversation, and I know we try to do that at Red Lake. I spent the last two weeks doing a webinar about Indian education that the tribal colleges were also listening to, and I made seven big points about Indian education and the history of our boarding schools. Yes, kids died at school, yes, it was a genocidal policy, but what was behind the rhetoric of assimilation? Understanding this history as a half-century of land loss is also something we should not forget. So I think now she's going to hand it over to tribes to respond in the ways that they feel are important.

Jason Schlender: Okay, so I want to thank you for your time. I appreciated your perspective. I just want to say miigwech for helping me make sense of what's going on, because I think a lot of time, I don't want to say a lot of time, but I think we get caught up in, I guess, the tragedy of it, and then we're left with feelings of a lot of anger. All this that happened to us … but I appreciate having somebody like you with your perspective, just saying, “Yeah, actually, those things actually did happen, now, what are we going to do?”

Dr. Brenda Child: Yes. That's where I am.

Jason Schlender: So I appreciate that, so I want to thank for your time and what do you got going on? Moving forward any projects you're working on? I know you mentioned you do a lot of work with the jingle dress?

Dr. Brenda Child: I've been doing that, and that's been very time-consuming, but really fun. Of course, we return to in-classroom teaching in the fall, so I'm looking forward to the fall semester, but I'm also writing a book about the history of American Indian marriage. And including various topics there, including the first chapter has always already been published in another book about the history of American Indian domestic violence. I'm hoping after this year teaching, I get a sabbatical the following year to finish my book.

Jason Schlender: What course or courses are you offering this fall?

Dr. Brenda Child: I'm teaching a grad seminar in the fall. We have a wonderful group of graduate students who do indigenous studies, so I'll be working with them, and one of my favorite things to most fall semesters is to teach the senior seminar for American Indian Studies majors, and I'll be doing that, and it's great because the students themselves come up with individual projects, and so I get to guide the students through their senior projects, and that's always a very rewarding class. And then I think in the spring semester, I'm doing a big lecture class called the Indians in Minnesota. So I teach assorted classes.

This past spring, I taught federal Indian policy. So that was great, and it's unfortunate that I don't have on the books or the history of Indian Education class this year, because I didn't anticipate all that conversation, but I think we'll be doing some workshops and other things on that history in Minnesota. And I always encourage folks if you're ever in the Phoenix area, to go see our long-standing boarding school exhibit that we updated and re-opened in 2019, called Away From Home, American Indian Boarding School Stories that's at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

Jason Schlender: Miigwech for your time, appreciate your perspective and your work as well, so we look forward to your upcoming books and your lectures.

Dr. Brenda Child: Okay, nice talking with you.

Jason Schlender: You too. Miigwech to Dr. Brenda Child for joining the podcast. To learn more about Brenda Child's work, go to cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/child011. To learn more about leadership and civic engagement, go to extension.umn.edu/community-development/leadership-and-civic-engagement, where you will find more resources on growing the leaders and strengthening leadership.

Make sure to follow the Minnesota Indigenous Leadership Network on Facebook, www.facebook.com/umn.indigenous.leadership.network, where you can stay up-to-date on research and resources for tribal communities and tribal leadership. We hope that you will join us again for another episode of Indigenized Connections On Air.