Introduction Post

Hi! My name is Sage and I use she/her pronouns. I’m a French and International Studies double major, and I work for the Title IX office and the CTL. I also volunteer with the Regional Office of Education (if you’re looking for volunteer opportunities, it’s a good one). I honestly feel like I don’t know enough about general Native American and Indigenous history to know what I’m excited about learning. In elementary school, I learned about the Indigenous communities in Wisconsin, mostly just in terms of their modes of life like 200 years ago. We had a couple of land acknowledgement plaques on the school grounds, which were on Ho-Chunk ancestral land. The best land acknowledgement was in the library, and it  was the best one in my mind because it was at the base of a giant wooden sculpture called Ho-Chunk Family Tree, sculpted by Harry Whitehorse. I say it was the best because the sculpture was more interesting than the gray rock that the other land acknowledgement plaque was on, and because there was a hollow at the statue’s base where you could crawl in, which was super exciting to me as a child (we definitely weren’t supposed to go in the statue, but we were allowed to touch it, which just made me want to crawl in it more.)

I also really loved to read in elementary school, so most of my knowledge about specific communities in North America comes from Louise Erdrich or Sherman Alexie. This also means that I don’t know a lot about actual historical events relating to Indigenous communities in the United States, because I was never a big nonfiction fan. 

Throughout my academic career, I’ve taken courses that touched on Indigenous resistance movements in the 60s and 70s, the prevalence of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous people. In high school and at Knox I’ve taken various Latin American area studies, so I formally learned about some general Indigenous history in Central and South America, but really not a lot, and once again, very general. Altogether, I feel like I’ve had lots of general, shallow learning experiences regarding Native American and Indigenous history, and a couple of very specific, more in-depth experiences that, while very interesting to learn about, are miniscule parts of larger historical context.