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Brenda Child, the Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has been awarded a 2022 Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Child was a Katrin Lamon Fellow at SAR in 1992-1993 and now serves on SAR’s board of directors.

In a press release for the University of MInnesota, Child states, “I am truly honored to have received the Guggenheim Fellowship. Not just for myself, but because it acknowledges the significance of my field, which is American Indian history. I have always felt supported in this work at the University of Minnesota. As we say in Ojibwe, “Chi-Miigwech,” thank you — it is so much!”

Child is a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in northern Minnesota, where she served as a member of a committee writing a new constitution for the 15,000-member nation. She also previously served as a member of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and was president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Child’s award-winning scholarly books include Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 2000) and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014). Her book for children, Bowwow Powwow (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2018) won the American Indian Youth Literature Award for best picture book.

Child’s Guggenheim award will support completion of her current book project, The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country.

[Photo credit: Nedahness Greene]