Description

A groundbreaking exploration of the remarkable women in Native American communities

In this well-researched and deeply felt account, Brenda J. Child, a professor and a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe tribe, gives Native American women their due, detailing the many ways in which they have shaped Native American life. She illuminates the lives of women such as Madeleine Cadotte, who became a powerful mediator between her people and European fur traders, and Gertrude Buckanaga, whose postwar community activism in Minneapolis helped bring many Indian families out of poverty. Moving from the early days of trade with Europeans through the reservation era and beyond, Child offers a powerful tribute to the courageous women who sustained Native American communities through the darkest challenges of the past three centuries.

About the Author

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studiesat the University of Minnesota, and former Chair of the Department of American IndianStudies. She is the author of several books in American Indian history includingBoarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940(1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award;Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community(2012);Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education(with Brian Klopotek, 2014). Her 2014 bookMy Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservationwon the American Indian Book Award and the Best Book in Midwestern History Award.She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian and past-president of the Native American & Indigenous StudiesAssociation. Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesotawhere she is a member of a committee writing a new constitution for the 12,000-member nation.