Friends Forum: A Series for Curious Minds

Lacie McMillin and Lisa Von Drasek discuss the Sonali Dev “Raje Series” on this installment of Read This Book! The Rajes are an immigrant Indian family descended from royalty, who have built their lives in San Francisco.

Lisa Von Drasek is the Curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Lacie McMillin is an Undergraduate Services Specialist at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Read This Book! is produced by the University of Minnesota Libraries. It is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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Poet Freya Manfred read from her latest book, “When I was Young and Old” during a June 15, 2023 event at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library.

Manfred is a longtime Midwest­erner who has lived on both coasts. She attended Macalester College and Stan­ford University, and has received a Radcliffe Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Her seventh collec­tion, “Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle,” won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for Poetry, and her poems have appeared in more than a 100 reviews and maga­zines and more than 50 anthologies. Her memoir, “Frederick Man­fred: A Daughter Remembers,” was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Award. Her more recent memoir is “Raising Twins: A True Life Adventure.”

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“Thank you to Marcia Pankake. This is incredible, to dedicate space and time and resources to poetry in our culture.” —Sun Yung Shin

The 14th Annual Pankake Poetry reading, named for librarian Marcia Pankake, took place on April 4, 2023. Poet and cultural worker Sun Yung Shin read from her latest book of poetry, “The Wet Hex,” a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for poetry. She described it as a book “about what our ancestors are asking of us.” Our audience, both in person and online, listened with rapt attention as she read.

“How did God make his hands small enough to form the faces of so many soldiers? / How did he concoct my family—from rope or broth? / A child can be renamed a thousand times, or denied the dignity altogether. / Die without one, live without one.”

To hear more of her work, please enjoy the event video. Learn more about Sun Yung Shin from her website.

Additional photos of the event are available to view and share. Photos by Luke Logan.

Thank you to the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries for sponsoring events in the Friends Forum: A Series for Curious Minds. These thought-provoking and intellectually engaging programs enrich both the campus and community. Not a member? Please consider supporting the Friends of the Libraries!

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By Allison Campbell-Jensen

While working for the U.S. Forest Service, Michael Dockry taught colleagues, one at a time, about the benefits of building relationships with indigenous people — that it makes sense to take advantage of the wisdom of those who have lived on these lands for generations.

At the annual “A Feast of Words” event, held Jan. 26 at the Campus Club, Dockry — wearing a traditional ribbon shirt — said that he came to the University of Minnesota in 2019 so that he could share his experiences and his research more broadly, with hundreds of young people who will work in forestry.

With a stronger foundation of building partnerships that last, these foresters and those in the natural resources departments of native nations with whom they work can benefit the generations to come.

“A lot of my profession is planning — getting people together to talk about our issues,” said Dockry, an assistant professor of tribal resource management in the University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences. If we can better plan for the future, “we can walk forward in unison.”

He added: “We can all admit we are in an unsustainable situation now.”

A Feast of Words is an annual event sponsored by the Friends of the University Libraries and the Campus Club.

Mike Dockry at “A Feast of Words.”

Along with teaching and research, Dockry is working with the Kawe Gidaa-naanaagadawendaamin Manoomin (Manoomin is an Ojibwe word for wild rice) — a joint Tribal-University Research Collaboration examining the decline in wild rice. The partnership involves tribal nations, intertribal treaty organizations, and the University of Minnesota.

Indigenous people are leading the way. For the different agencies of federal, state, county, and indigenous nations’ governments to work well together, however, he says they need to pay attention to principles for strategic partnerships.

Among the past and present harms to be acknowledged is the U of M’s focus on cultivating wild rice. Public historian Chris Rico, who trained at the University of Minnesota and was in the audience, spent years in the University Archives tracing the evidence of this seemingly well-intentioned research by U of M scientists.

Presenting the scientists’ point of view, Dockry said: “It could be more efficient.”

But to the nations who came to the Upper Midwest because of wild rice, the Anishinabe (Ojibwe) peoples, wild rice is not only food; wild rice is a spiritual relative, a sovereign being. Some tribes with this family relationship say to scientists: “You have no right to do that,” to breed a type of wild rice that provides larger harvests.

That sort of research, Dockry added, is not being done to support wild rice. As a parallel, Dockry said: “Nobody would change Grandma so that she would cook soup for 15 hours a day.” The tribes are showing us how to lead: “If Grandma’s sick, let’s have a family discussion.”

And one of the ways to build trust for that family discussion is to build connections.

“We have to canoe the waters together; we have to walk the lands together,” Dockry said.

— Michael Dockry

Wilderness is a myth dreamed up and inculcated by the colonial settlers. Land “untrammeled by Man” does not and did not exist in North America, Dockry says. Today, there are 574 federally recognized tribes who formerly (and currently) steward the lands, waters, and forests. The tribes who were photographed at the beginning of the 20th century by Smithsonian ethnographers to capture their ways “before they vanished”? They have not vanished.

“We are still here,” Dockry says. Despite removals of most of the peoples from their original territories to reservations in remote areas, “all lands in the United States were tribal lands. For generations after generations, we’ve been managing them.”

In what is now Wisconsin, the Menominee Tribe have always been living in what is now Northeast Wisconsin. Their lands have been managed according to the formula advanced by Chief Oshkosh in the 19th century and rights solidified by treaty with the U.S. government.

More than 100 years later, in contemporary satellite images, the Menominee reservation stands out as a green, forested space in an otherwise patchworked landscape.

Their successful forest management, which benefits the local economy as well as the ecology, is just one example of how indigenous people can help all of us address the challenges we face in the 21st century, from social changes to climate change.

After land management by native peoples, original prairie plants returned. “Big Bluestem came back after these burns,” Dockry said. “The soil has memory.” As do the indigenous peoples of what is now North America.

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Giving speech to the spirit of formerly enslaved person Eliza Winston, poet and dancer Mary Moore Easter offered a captivating presentation on Dec. 6. With her co-presenters — Joan Hepburn, a retired Professor of English, with a concentration of West African theater, from St. Olaf College, and Siddeeqah Shabazz, actor at Pillsbury House Theater and the Guthrie Theater, as well as Executive Director of Kulture Klub Collaborative — Easter quoted from Winston’s brief court testimony, along with her own poems, to recreate the life of a woman who escaped to freedom in Minnesota.

The book of poems by Easter, “Free Papers: Poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave freed in Minnesota in 1860,” were partly explained by Easter and partly enacted with Hepburn and Shabazz. The powerful poems jolted the attendees in the Andersen Library audience and those who joined online with a collective electricity.

Mary Moore Easter is an award-winning poet and author, whose books and poetry and articles can be accessed at the U of M Libraries, online or in-person. She also is the founder and Director of Carleton College’s dance program.

Become a Friend of the U of M Libraries, and don’t miss another memorable gathering.

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David Mura was the featured poet at the 13th Annual Pankake Poetry on April 7, 2022 at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library. reading featuring Mura has written four books of poetry, has won numerous awards for his writing, and has taught at several colleges and universities, including the University of Minnesota. Following the reading, poet Ed Bok Lee and Mura engaged in conversation.

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“Humanities on the Front Lines: Public Partnerships and Transforming the University” was the title of the Jan. 27, 2022 presentation for A Feast of Words, an annual event presented by the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Campus Club.

Professor Jigna Desai and Associate Professor Tracey Deutsch discussed the important work of Minnesota Transform, a higher education initiative funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that addresses decolonial and racial justice in the University, Twin Cities, and state through public humanities projects. Both Desai and Deutsch emphasized the community-led nature of Minnesota Transform’s work and philosophy.

Mike Hoyt, who leads Pillsbury House + Theatre’s creative community development work, spoke about the artistic projects that have been fostered in collaboration with Minnesota Transform. Librarian Kat Nelsen discussed how the University Libraries and Minnesota Transform have worked in partnership to support paid student internships.

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By Allison Campbell-Jensen

“You can’t be what you can’t see,” said Larry McKenzie, award-winning coach, speaker, and author, during the Nov. 18 Friends of the Libraries event Amplifying Black Narratives: The Creation of Black Narratives. Among the important resources for creating Black narratives are people who serve as “mirrors” that reflect possibilities yet may be scarce in the community.

When Sheletta Brundidge published her first children’s book, “Cameron Goes to School,” her uncle Tim was especially moved by it. He revealed that 40 years ago, he had written a book for his daughter, but he put it away because he was told no one would buy it because its main character was Black. Had his work been received differently, “we could have had two or three authors in my family,” says Brundidge, who has also published “Daniel Finds His Voice” and hosts a podcasting platform.

Black American Muslim poet, arts educator, and performance artist Sagirah Shahid is a writer-in-residence in a program for Minnesota State Colleges called Write Like Us to mentor students who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. It’s a way to overcome invisibility.

Each of these participants has overcome the destructive idea from the past, described by moderator Dara Beevas as “our stories as Black storytellers are not as important.” During the conversation, they shared ways for creators of Black narratives to battle doubt, celebrate excellence, and share stories throughout the year.

Beevas, as the co-founder of Wise Ink publishing, has found that many Black and brown people do not feel worthy of being published. The doubt can be instilled early. When she asked her middle school teacher in a journal how to become a writer, her question was dismissed; the reply was to only write about things that were important.

To fight doubt in one’s abilities, Shahid said writers must find their community, whether in family, peer group, or even one other person who will support you. McKenzie, author of “Basketball: Much More Than a Game,” went further: “You have to learn to be your biggest cheerleader.”

Advising creators of Black narratives to “shake it off,” Brundidge added that “we have to remember what we’ve overcome. … If you believe in yourself, there’s nothing that can stop you.”

Beevas noted that McKenzie has said: “If our kids really knew our ancestors were kings and queens, it would lead to radical change.” There’s an absence of books that tell the story of Black ancestors in Africa, Beevas said, a gap that needs to be filled.

Celebrating excellence means telling stories of Black people like baseball’s Jackie Robinson and basketball’s Bill Russell, McKenzie said, who were successful yet couldn’t stay in the same hotels as their teammates. They may not have started as excellent, but they achieved it. In his work, he strives to build young people into champions in every arena.

While some might criticize her for bragging, Brundidge noted that she does not want to dumb down her achievements. The outstanding NASA scientist Katherine Johnson didn’t speak up and did not have her story told for 50 years, until “Hidden Figures” came out. Brundidge is not apologetic: “I come into a room with my own spotlight.”

“We are the ancestors for the next generation,” Shahid said. Requiring Black people to be excellent in order to be appreciated for their value, humanity, and creativity, even to enjoy basic dignity, is a result of our inequitable society. Pushing back against these circumstances in a joking way, she said being our awkward ordinary selves should be celebrated, too. (Her upcoming children’s activity book is “Get Involved in a Book Club.”) Creators of Black narratives can convey the truth of being excellent in their own ways, she said.

“Ordinary people did extraordinary things over time,” Beevas said; that’s the Black story. From the spirituals that transcended despair to create joy to the creativity shown in dressing up for church, she said, “Black narratives are so powerful because we make everything dope.”

Yet, they still can be caught up short, as when Brundidge and her daughter were doing a school exercise that called for filling in blanks in a story with emojis representing family members. But there were no Black emojis on the school computer they were using; they couldn’t cut and paste a Black grandfather emoji. Unable to complete the story, they decided to pass on doing that exercise. Everyone should notice when representation is overwhelmingly white.

To be better supporters of Black writers, non-Black people need to move from being allies to being co-conspirators, inviting Black leaders to their homes and libraries to talk, for instance, McKenzie said. And, Beevas added, the Black leaders need to be paid to be part of the un-learning of those who are not Black.

Shahid asked co-conspirators to consider what they would risk to place Black emojis on school computers or to gain representation of people of color in other places where they have been erased. Appropriate recognition is important. Brundidge said when asked to speak at a Black History Month event, she would expect to be paid and not do it just for the offer of “exposure.” She said: “Those days are done.”

Moreover, Black writers and leaders should be recognized every month of the year — and beyond. Inviting, investing in, and celebrating creators of Black narratives every day of the year — that is what will make a difference in amplifying Black narratives and writers.

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