Happy Holidays from the Minnesota Humanities Center

Happy Holidays from the Minnesota Humanities Center! The Minnesota Humanities Center Blog will be taking a holiday break for the next two weeks. Please check back for new blog posts starting January 5, 2017.

The offices of the Humanities Center will be closed on:

• Friday, December 23, 2016
• Monday, December 26, 2016
• Monday, January 2, 2017

See you again in 2017!

Edairra McCalister - Unity Circle: Seeing Our Girls and Womyn

Edairra McCalister is a proud mother and an educator. She is a recent graduate of Metropolitan State University with a Master’s of Science in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Schooling from the School of Urban Education. Edairra participated in the Minnesota Humanities Center’s 2016 Summer Educators’ Institute.

I have always wanted to become an educator. As a child I dreamt of the day that I would have my very own classroom, so I practiced by playing school with my siblings regularly. The day that my dream came true was the journey of joy, pain, and learning curves that began with no signs of slowing down.

I’ve worked in North Minneapolis as an educator for the past two years and traveled the journey as if I were made for it, because I believe I was. However, somewhere along that journey joy departed, and as a result, I recently resigned from my teaching position a quarter into my third year. With no new job on the horizon, and no plan in place, my resignation was an act of shear faith and me taking a stand for what I believe in.

While participating in the Humanities Center’s week-long summer Educator’s Institute in June of 2016, I made a breakthrough in understanding my purpose and direction as a black womyn and educator. Rich discussions about absent narratives, understanding place, and exploration of epistemologies, equipped me with much to bring back to the classroom to engage in critical learning. It was learning about the transformative practice of holding a ‘Story Circle’ – as introduced and facilitated by Ms. Rose McGee during the Institute – that planted a seed.

As part of the Educators’ Institute, participants were required to create an action plan based on enduring understandings from lessons that took place throughout the week. My own personal and professional experiences of invisibility as a black womyn, and my desire to share those stories, particularly one that took place about mid-way through the week during the Institute, inspired an action plan titled: Unity Circle.

Unity Circle was created using storytelling as its key component because it provided an opportunity and platform for girls/womyn of color to share experiences and facilitate critical dialogues. I envisioned the space to be cultivated within a Unity Circle as a potential way to deconstruct invisibility and create a sense of value amongst girls/womyn, and was eager to begin creating this space with my scholars. I saw this work as necessary and, at this point, there was no dedicated space for girls/womyn of color in the school environment. The need to address the absent narratives of girls/womyn of color in the school setting presented Unity Circle as an option to become the focus of my master’s thesis research.

In response to issues faced by black girls in the school setting, I did facilitate Unity Circle this past November with scholars attending school on the North side of Minneapolis.  Unity Circle proved more than I had imagined but, most importantly, everything I hoped for black girls – that being a safe space to speak and hear others. Engaging in this work is not easy, but it is important. I know all too well how it feels to be silenced and unseen, which is why I concluded that remaining an educator who felt invisible in their school environment would be antithetical to the work of deconstructing invisibility and revealing absent narratives. The Humanities Center’s Educators’ Institute changed my life quite literally, and I was empowered when I decided to stand for what I know to be right, despite perceived consequences.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”—Zora Neale Hurston

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Annamarie Gutsch - Much More Than Just an Exhibit: Why Treaties Matter Works

Annamarie Gutsch is best known for her work with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, having served as Executive Director from 2006-2015. She celebrates a long career in public service to the American Indian Tribes and communities and the people of Minnesota as a Government Relations Director for the Red Lake Nation. She has also worked for the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, for Veterans Affairs, and at the Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Annamarie serves on the Minnesota Humanities Center’s Board of Directors and was instrumental in creating the traveling exhibit Why Treaties Matter: Self-Government in the Dakota and Ojibwe Nation.

UPDATE: “Why Treaties Matter” is now on permanent display at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. For more information, visit: www.treatiesmatter.org.

Why Treaties Matter: Self-Government in the Dakota and Ojibwe Nation is a nationally recognized, award-winning, traveling exhibit made in partnership with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, the Minnesota Humanities Center, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. This exhibit explores relationships between Dakota and Ojibwe Indian Nations and the U.S. government in this place we now call Minnesota, focusing on, how treaties affected the lands and lifeways of the indigenous peoples of this place, and why these binding agreements between nations still matter today.

Within our time to create, there always seemed to be an even more profound time to silently reflect and think – time to stretch our minds beyond why we were creating a project with ongoing deep reflection to envision exactly what we were trying to portray to our audience. What was our goal? We wanted to change Minnesota’s dismal understanding of our American Indian communities and create a hunger to learn more while perhaps creating new relationships in a way never accomplished before. With this goal in mind, the greatest collaboration I’ve ever participated in — the Why Treaties Matter exhibit — was born.

From start to the finish, the Why Treaties Matter collaboration and exhibit run, several members of the development team--consisting of me and a core group of outstanding Humanities Center program directors and administrators--spent endless hours of vision-building time together. Time spent sitting around a table, coffee or some beverage and snacks nearby, papers strewn about, where we pondered the simplest or the most complex ideas or thoughts, or, just ripped apart raw details in an agenda for an upcoming program. This was far more than just your everyday nine-to-five working group. It was a group on a mission; a mission that we often proclaimed was “to change the world.” This team of inspiring leaders seemed the perfect group of individuals whose eyes, when mixed together, could see far beyond what most people are capable of envisioning. And as we gathered, it became clear to me that this magnetic force drawing our visions together was truly one that would lead to great success.

The Why Treaties Matter exhibit success wasn’t due to any one person’s academic or intellectual abilities or because we were equipped with greater administrative capacity or even money to turn out such a successful exhibit and programming. It was truly a recipe with healthy doses of eager world changers coming together to contribute their collective knowledge and stories. Most importantly, we were not necessarily the masters of the knowledge but more like the gatherers of it. The true master creators and voices of this project were the cultural leaders, elders, and community members who led this initiative. They came together with us, to sit around the table and helped create a tangible, truth-filled exhibit that has successfully moved towards changing how treaties and the history around them are viewed by both native and non-native people.

The Why Treaties Matter exhibit has touched over 67,200 lives since 2011. For an exhibit that existed well beyond its imagined time to tour various venues across Minnesota for six total years, that’s some spectacular record. What is even more profound is that out of the countless pairs of eyes and minds that gathered information from this rich visual and personal learning experience, most had likely never seen or heard any of this before. Although we knew this was the case, the responses were still overwhelming to us. Email after email proclaimed, “Why haven’t I heard this history before?” Think about that. The real history and story of the lives of our American Indian/indigenous people to this land and most people have never heard anything of it before. This is why we so steadfastly held to our claim that we would “change the world.” As we embark on the seventh year of this remarkable journey, I like to think in a small but profound way that we did.

To learn more about this exhibit, view this exhibit on line and, access accompanying educator guides visit treatiesmatter.org.

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