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A Different Way of Knowing
5/8/2009

George Morrison, a renowned painter and sculptor, was among the first faculty members hired for the Department of American Indian Studies. Photos courtesy of University Archives.

The nation's first Department of American Indian Studies, at the University of Minnesota, celebrates 40 years of existence.

By Tim Brady

Stretching back through the first half of the 20th century, prevailing wisdom suggested that American Indian populations must either successfully assimilate within the dominant culture or cease to exist. At the University of Minnesota, as elsewhere, little or no effort was expended in trying to understand or accommodate the Native American community as an ongoing entity.

Today, the University of Minnesota is home to one of the leading centers of American Indian study in the nation, with an unsurpassed language program, including the only Dakota language instruction in the country. This spring, the U’s Department of American Indian Studies—committed to embracing “ways of knowing that stand in contrast to the linear analytic Euro-American studies typically found in colleges and universities”—celebrates its 40th birthday. In fact, it was the nation’s first department of American Indian studies.

Interest in American Indian studies at the U was a long time coming, but when the climate for change finally arrived it happened swiftly. The birth of the department, in June 1969, came after more than a century of general neglect. It followed on the heels of an acrimonious winter on campus that began with the January 1969 takeover of University administration offices in Morrill Hall by a group of African American students and continued through a spring full of political turmoil. Among the demands of the black activists was the creation of a department of African American studies (the department was subsequently established).

More quietly in May of that year, a committee of faculty members—chaired by anthropology professor Frank Miller; Native American students headed by G. William Craig (B.A. ’75), who was president of American Indian Student Association; and community representatives, including Will Antell (Ph.D. ’73), director of Indian Education for the State Department of Education—sat down to discuss the creation of a Department of American Indian Studies at the U.

They put together a plan that emphasized a curriculum centered on the study of Native languages, particularly the region’s dominant Indian tongues, Ojibwe and Dakota. They also set out to “educate the university’s general population about the complexities of the American Indian experience,” in the words of department history written years later. They wanted American Indian studies to have a sense of independence and autonomy and to be funded by hard money from the University. “We wanted to make sure that it was a department, rather than a program,” says Miller. “We wanted it to have its own core faculty, so that it wasn’t dependent upon other departments for its teaching.”

There would be undergraduate courses in Minnesota Indian history and culture and upper division courses in education, law, medicine, public health, and social work. And it was agreed that studies in the Ojibwe and Dakota languages would fulfill language requirements in the College of Liberal Arts—another first. “No other university in the world allowed an American Indian language to serve that purpose,” Miller says.

There was some limited dissent from general faculty members, who thought American Indian studies did not warrant its own department. But on June 7, 1969, the University’s Board of Regents approved the proposal and, by the fall of that year, the Department of American Indian Studies had opened its doors. Its first tenure track hires included Timothy Dunnigan, who would head the language programs, artist George Morrison, and chair of the department, historian Roger Buffalohead.

Native American education was notoriously given over to the boarding school system, which spirited thousands of young Indians from their homes and families through the last years of the 19th and well into the 20th century. If the boarding school experience wasn't enough to dampen an inclination to higher education, the curriculum at these schools was.

What made the advent of the department perhaps even more remarkable than the fact that it was the first of its kind in the nation was how far the idea of American Indian studies had traveled in just a few years. The University had offered little in the line of Native studies before the 1960s. The U’s department of anthropology had long offered courses on a wide variety of American Indians, including Plains Indians, South American Indians, and Middle American Indians. And there were field archaeology classes on prehistoric Native sites in Minnesota. But when Miller arrived at the University in 1964, he could find no classes dedicated to the study of the living tribes of Minnesota Indians.

Acclaimed novelist Gerald Vizenor (B.A. ’60), an Ojibwe who would one day teach in the Department of American Indian Studies, was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in the late 1950s. Speaking to historian Clarke Chambers for an oral history of the University, Vizenor said that the only Native American presence that he could find at the U in his undergraduate days was in the department of anthropology.

When Gerald Vizenor attended the University in the 1950s, the only instruction on American Indians treated “Native cultures as if they are vanished or vanishing objects.” Vizenor went on to become an acclaimed novelist who taught in the U’s Department of American Indian Studies.

Even at that, it was a dissatisfying experience. “It was the methodology, the sense of dominance,” recalled Vizenor of what was disturbing about the instruction, “treating Native cultures as if they are vanishing objects.”

Only a handful of Indian students attended the University of Minnesota at any given time before World War II. No numbers of these students were collected by the U, and the best indicator of enrollment—occasional correspondence between the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Office of the Dean of Students regarding the progress of Indian students on campus—offers only sketchy details.

As part of the assimilation effort, Native American education was notoriously given over to the boarding school system, which spirited thousands of young Indians from their homes and families through the last years of the 19th and well into the 20th century. If the boarding school experience wasn’t enough to dampen an inclination to higher education, the curriculum at these schools was purposefully technical, most often encouraging Native students to learn vocational skills rather than pursue scholarly or professional fields. Nevertheless, some Indian students found their way to the U of M, particularly after General College opened in the early 1930s; and the BIA supplied some assistance to them.

The scholarship Native students found in Minneapolis was often deeply flavored with the prejudice of the time. The founder of the anthropology department, for instance, viewed Native Americans as vanishing primitives and studied their physical characteristics, intending to prove their inadequacies and inevitable extinction by measuring the size and shapes of heads and feet. In archaeology, early University professors had no qualms about unearthing Indian burial grounds in search of ancestral bones, which were subsequently stored in lab drawers. And in the history department, the impact of Native people on American heritage was largely ignored, except as an impediment to progress and manifest destiny or as an object of the past.

The pressures that would ultimately bring change to the University and the nation began building in the years after World War II. The increasing urbanization of Native Americans and the need to offer assistance in multiple forms to Indian populations both on and off the reservation had been growing for many years. It was estimated that between 5,000 and 15,000 Native Americans were living in the Twin Cities by the mid-1960s—a jump from the estimated hundreds in the late 1920s. Simultaneously, Native American populations had grown disenchanted with the BIA’s hands-off approach to aiding Native Americans living off the reservations in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul. The mounting strength of the nation’s Civil Rights movement within the African American community brought attention to the problems of Native Americans as well. And new perceptions of the problems of Native American populations began to percolate in the general public and in academe.

Beginning in the late 1950s at the University of Minnesota, two members of the Office of the Dean of Students—Henry Allen, coordinator of religious activities, and Matthew Stark (M.A. ’59), coordinator of human relations—had begun to reach out to American Indian students. Allen established ties with Ojibwe bands and tribal leaders on the reservations of northern Minnesota. Stark, who was intimately involved in a number of programs that revolved around the Civil Rights movement, had begun the Project Awareness Program, designed to teach University students about Native American culture while bringing Indian students into the U community.

Federal dollars started to flow into the urban community from President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and Indian social welfare organizations, primarily centered around Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis, began to receive support to identify and ameliorate the difficulties of city living.

In June 1964, the U hosted a meeting that included several offices of the University of Minnesota, a member of the state’s newly created Minnesota Indian Affairs Commission, and officials from the BIA. The reason for the gathering was relatively simple: Increasing numbers of Native Americans in the Upper Midwest were moving to cities. The problems they faced were the same as any other transplanted newcomers: finding employment, housing, health services, education, and social and recreational outlets. Compounding these difficulties, however, was their lack of urban life skills, as well as the cultural prejudice Indians faced once there. Many also arrived with a background steeped in extreme poverty. The question before the committee was straightforward: What could the University of Minnesota do to help alleviate the problems of the state and region’s Native people?

The most immediate offshoot of this gathering was the creation of an Ad Hoc Committee on American Indian Affairs on campus. This committee was set up to survey present activities of individuals and departments regarding American Indians in the Upper Midwest; to gather information about specific courses centered around the study of Native Americans; to search for financial assistance for research and “action programs in regard to American Indians”; to create lines of communication between interested parties, including the committee, the BIA, the state’s

: When anthropology professor Frank Miller arrived at the University in 1964, he found no classes dedicated to the study of the living tribes of Minnesota Indians. He helped plan the establishment of the Department of American Indian Studies.

Indian Affairs Division, and the Minnesota Tribal Council; and “to make recommendations to various staff member at the University concerning needed programs, research studies, or academic courses which might be worthwhile in understanding American Indian culture.” Members of the committee included Allen, Stark, and faculty from the departments of sociology and anthropology and General College.

The scholarship Native students found in Minneapolis was often deeply flavored with the prejudice of the time. In archaeology, professors had no qualms about unearthing Indian burial grounds in search of ancestral bones, which were subsequently stored in lab drawers. In history, the impact of Native people was largely ignored, except as an impediment to progress or as an object of the past.

In June 1966, a year and a half after its formation, the committee put together a “Proposal for a Department of American Indian Studies” that formalized many of these items.

“Since [the chartering of the University in Minnesota in 1851] the American Indians in Minnesota and throughout the western part of the United States have suffered from the loss of most of their lands, the destruction of their traditional economic base, inconsistent and discriminatory government policies, and inferior opportunities for education,” the proposal read. “In spite of these adversities, Indian communities and Indian culture have persisted in Minnesota and in other parts of the United States. . . . Educational institutions in general and the University of Minnesota in particular have a special responsibility to offer to the people of the state, both Indian and non-Indian, an education that is adequate to deal with the complexities of contemporary Indian affairs.”

But the time was not quite right for such decisive action.

Meanwhile, more students from the Native American community were arriving at the U. Their numbers were still relatively small (45 students of American Indian ancestry were registered at the U when the department was founded), but it was a significant increase from the dozen or so who attended the U in the late 1950s. And most, if not all, were influenced by the growing sense that their needs had not been met by the University. The entire student body was becoming more politicized, and Native American students were no exception. In the fall of 1968, they founded the American Indian Student Association, which began pushing the University to address the concerns of its Native students, many of which were contained in the proposals of the Ad Hoc Committee on American Indian Affairs.

Simultaneously, the Native American community beyond the University was emerging as a powerful force for change. Centered in Minneapolis, which now held one of the largest urban populations of American Indians in the United States, Indian activism coalesced in the creation of the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in the summer of 1968 by Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks, and others. While AIM would turn out to have little to do specifically with the creation of the Department of American Indian Studies at the U of M, it was a critical part of the milieu in which the department was born.

By the end of the 1960s, students and faculty across the nation were familiar with tpolitical upheaval and rapid change. Action committees and campus meetings could be summoned at the speed in which a mimeograph could produce a flyer. The glacial pace of change that typified college administration melted and suddenly campuses all across the country were different than they had been.

The entire student body was becoming more politicized, and Native American students were no exception. In the fall of 1968, they founded the American Indian Student Association, which began pushing the University to address the concerns of its Native students, many of which were contained in the proposals of the Ad Hoc Committee on American Indian Affairs.

So it was at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1969. A community that had shown little interest in its Native American citizens for too long was suddenly the home of the first Department of American Indian Studies in the United States. Its establishment would inspire future students and faculty members, like Jean O’Brien, growing up in Faribault, Minnesota.

“I was Ojibwe and had just discovered Indian activism,” says O’Brien, now head of the U’s Department of American Indian Studies. “I knew that I wanted to study Native American culture and it made all the difference in the world to me that the University of Minnesota not only had a Department of American Indian Studies, but that it was the first one in the country.”

This May, the U’s Department of American Indian Studies will be part of another first: It’s hosting the first-ever meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, a new professional organization for scholars around the world who are studying American Indian/Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous people.

Tim Brady is a St. Paul–based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Minnesota.

Remembering Edward Rogers

Probably the most memorable Native American student at the University of Minnesota in its earliest days arrived in Minneapolis soon after the turn of the century. Edward Rogers (J.D. 1904) had grown up in Walker, Minnesota, the son of lumberman William Rogers and an Ojibwe woman, Mary Racine (Sha gosha day wa be quay), from Sandy Lake. As a boy, he was sent off to one of the country’s most famous Indian boarding schools—Carlisle Academy in Pennsylvania—where he became a star football player on the renowned all–Native American team, coached by Pop Warner. While playing a game in New York, Rogers subsequently told a reporter that he was able to buy a Minneapolis newspaper “and got homesick” while reading of a U of M football game. After graduating from Carlisle, Rogers returned to Minnesota to study law at the U and play more football. Rogers was voted captain of the famed 1903 Gopher football squad and kicked the tying extra point in the inaugural “Little Brown Jug” game.

Rogers played one season with the Gophers and then headed back to Carlisle, where he replaced Pop Warner as coach for a single season—Jim Thorpe’s first at the academy. He returned to Minnesota to coach the St. Thomas football team as he finished up his law degree at the University. Then he moved back to Walker to practice law. Ed Rogers subsequently served as Cass County attorney in two lengthy stints that totaled 46 years, beginning in 1912. He was also very active in Chippewa tribal matters, both on a local and national level. Rogers became counsel for one of the earliest national Indian organizations, the National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944. Toward the end of his career, Rogers was heaped with awards: Not only was he elected national County Attorney of the Year, and inducted into the National Indian Hall of Fame, but in 1968 he was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame. Rogers died in 1971 at age 95, and Cass County has recently honored him with a statue that resides in front of the county courthouse.