Guest+Artists+and+Speakers

=[|Kent Nerburn - Nationally acclaimed writer] =

FRIDAY MAY 15th
He has taught at Bemidji State University, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation, where he developed and directed Project Preserve, an award winning oral history project in which students collected and published the memories of tribal elders.
 * Kent Nerburn** is the highly acclaimed author of eight books on spiritual values and Native American themes. He received his B.A. in American Studies summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota and his Ph.D. in Theology and Art with distinction from Graduate Theological Union in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley.

[|Kent's Home Page]

Nerburn, Kent. "Neither Wolf nor Dog"

"...for us, the story of our people was like a song. As long as somebody could still sing it, it was real. It never mattered if someone wrote it down. When you came you said that our song wasn't real because it wasn't written down." p. 243

"...none of what we know is history to you. Our sacred stories are just legends to you. The powers we were given by our ancestors you think are superstitions. The responsibilities, too. None of that is real in your history." p. 239

"Why don't you say that [Abraham Lincoln] is still alive today in the hearts of your people? Why don't you teach your history so that your children have to keep him alive in their hearts and make that more important than knowing how tall he was and where he was born? "You teach your children that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Why don't you teach them that he made you all slave-freers and that you are now his children and must uphold his honor?" p. 242

"...you wasichu are in trouble. For you, nothing is wakan. You have taken the power out of the Earth and the sky and the things that live there. Everything is a fact. You will drown under your facts." p. 244

"You call [our historical artifacts] sacred because you don't have anything of your own that's sacred. But it's not sacred because you took the sacred out of it, just like you take the sacred out of everything, and now we can hardly feel it ourselves anymore." p. 258

"...perhaps it is not by love, but by blood, that land is bought... perhaps my people had to die to nourish this earth with their truth. Your people did not have ears to hear. Perhaps we had to return to the earth, so that we could grow within your hearts. Perhaps we have comeback and will fill the hills and valleys with our song." p. 275 From "Downtown Dakota Land", Emily Blessing =**Dr. Roxanne Gould - Native American Educator** =

=Thursday and Friday, Feb. 19th & 20th=
 * Roxanne Gould** ( Odawa/ Ojibwe) Roxanne received her BA and MA from the University of South Dakota and her doctorate at the University of Minnesota in education with her research emphasis on global Indigenous education and leadership. Her most recent research was looking at Indigenous education best practice models with an emphasis on the Maori of New Zealand. Roxanne presently works as a consultant for Mpls. Schools-Indian Education. Her previous work experience included serving on the faculty of Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, teaching American Indian, International Relations and Chemical Health Studies. Roxanne also served as director for the American Indian Learning Resource Center at the University of Minnesota for nine years. As a past recipient of a both a Bush and Kellogg Leadership fellowships Roxanne was afforded the opportunity to research and work with Indigenous people and leaders in Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Cuba, Sweden, Norway, China, New Zealand and Canada. Roxanne is also the co-founder of the Sharing the Dream/Indigenous Women’s Exchange, an Indigenous community development project in Guatemala. Her passion to create Indigenous global alliances also opened doors to organize Indigenous exchanges to New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Basque country and co-lead a faculty development program to Namibia. Roxanne’s work reflects her commitment to social justice and methods of decolonization that will bring about healing in Indigenous communities.

=Missy Whiteman = =Film Maker and Visual Artist =

[[image:Missy_4.jpg align="right"]]
=== Missy Whiteman (Arapaho and Kickapoo) understands her work to be a voice for her ancestors—to educate and to foster better understanding among all peoples as well as to promote change in Native and non-Native other communities. While based in part on traditional ways and ideas, Whiteman’s art also addresses themes of loss in relation to larger cultural forces. ===

Host Joanna Kohler interviews artist and filmmaker Missy Whiteman about her work and her involvement with the Beyond Borders Film Festival scheduled to open March 25th at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis. [|Missy on "Butter City"]

=Georgia Wettlin-Larsen (Assiniboine/Nakota) =

**First Nation Composers Initiative**
=March 27th =



===**Georgia Wettlin-Larsen (Whirling Cloud Woman), (Assiniboine/Nakota)**. Georgia is currently the Program Director for the St. Paul, Minnesota based, First Nations Composer Initiative. She brings a unique blend of over ten years of social service experience and national renown as an American Indian musician whose emphasis is in the perpetuation and preservation of traditional story and song. Most recently Wettlin-Larsen provides contracted services for the State of Minnesota Department of Human Services’ Family and Children’s Division. She travels statewide facilitating training on the Indian Child Welfare Act, historical and contemporary Federal Indian Policy and traditional child welfare practices. She is a strong advocate of music as an essential factor in child development, and has released a CD on the Allies label, //From the Sky: Native Stories in Song and Sound//, that is especially accessible to children. Her vocal talent and extensive knowledge of songs from diverse Native traditions have produced dramatic interpretations of Native story and song for radio (//Song of the Land//, NPR), television (//Northern Exposure//, CBS) and the Folkways recording label of the Smithsonian Institution. //(Heartbeat:Voices of First Nations Women//) Georgia has had the pleasure of sharing performing venues throughout Indian Country with many other notable performers including, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, John Trudell, Rosalie Jones of Daystar Dance Theater, Sharon Burch, R.Carlos Nakai, Pete Seeger, and comedian Charlie Hill to name but a few. Georgia’s primary goal is to work to shatter stereotypes which plague traditional American Indian music and to educate the public about its true essence and inherent beauty and purpose===

=April 17th - Field Trip to Birchbark Books = =and the Bockley Gallery = =Bockley Gallery - Works by George Morrison = media type="file" key="Birch:Bockleysm.mov" Trip to Birchbark Books and the Bockley Gallery



//George Morrison: Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist//
The American Indian Quarterly - Volume 30, Number 3&4, Summer/Fall 2006, pp. 646-660 [|University of Nebraska Press] ==George Morrison: Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist - The American Indian Quarterly 30:3&4 The American Indian Quarterly 30.3&4 (2006) 646-660 George Morrison Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist Gerald Vizenor George Morrison was an eminent expressionist painter with a singular romantic vision and an erudite sense of natural reason and liberty. He created an elusive shimmer of "endless space," the color and eternal motion of nature. The horizons he painted were inspired by nature and lightened by his watch and visual memories of Lake Superior near the Grand Portage Reservation in Minnesota. The artistic creations of George Morrison and Allan Houser were presented in the recent inaugural exhibition of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). "Morrison and Houser belonged to a small disparate group of Native American artists," noted Truman Lowe in Native Modernism, "who ushered in a new, modernist era in Native art history, in which identification with a uniform Indian aesthetic gave way to greater freedom for personal experimentation and expression." Morrison was an artist of modern Native liberty. Native American Indian artists clearly demonstrated the sentiments of romanticism and modernism many generations before occidental dominance, but the name and notion of personal, emotive creative practices that departed from selected traditions have been embraced only recently. Native artists were expressionists and...==

=Bockley Gallery =

[|Bockley Gallery] 

=Birchbark Books =



[|Birchbark Books] Our Story
===Aniin! Boozhoo! Han and Hau! Welcome to Birchbark Books. There is no one like us in person, and no one like us online. We are not owned by a corporation; we are not part of a chain. We are that increasingly rare thing -- a tiny independent bookstore.=== ===We exist to keep real conversations between book lovers alive. We exist to nourish and build a community based on books. We are a neighborhood bookstore, and also an international presence. Our visitors come from Minneapolis-St. Paul, from every U.S. reservation and Canadian reserve, and from all over the world. We are different from all other bookstores on earth!=== ===We are a locus for Indigirati -- literate Indigenous people who have survived over half a millennium on this continent. We sponsor readings by Native and non-Native writers, journalists, historians. Check our photo gallery for highlights.===

Native Amer. Film producer, director, community organizer


The program, hosted by Peter Coyote, will air on ABC television network affiliate stations across the country, beginning October 12. Locally, the program will air on KSTP TV (Channel 5) on October 19th at 5:00 AM. Link to "Native Nations: Standing Together for Civil Rights":
 * SYD BEANE'S** recent project "Native Nations: Standing Together for Civil Rights" chronicles the American Indians’ struggle for civil rights, and the creation of the National Indian Lutheran Board to raise funds and awareness for that struggle. From the controversy surrounding the 1862 trial when 38 Dakota Sioux were executed in the largest single-day mass hanging in United States history, to the confrontation of the 1960s when many Indian tribes joined together to speak out with a unified voice//, Native Nations// tells the story of standing together for sovereignty, justice and civil rights. “The history of Native Americans has not been told from our own perspective. Until the true story is told, it’s hard for this country to heal its relations with its native peoples.”

=Thursday June 4th, 2009 - Last Day of Class = =<span style="display: block; color: rgb(255, 138, 0); text-align: center; background-color: rgb(128, 0, 128); font-size: 130%; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Willie Male Bear = =<span style="display: block; text-align: center; color: rgb(255, 138, 0); background-color: rgb(128, 0, 128);">Lakota Elder, Educator, Singer = media type="file" key="Willie Sings.mov" Willie Sings