Author Talk | Brenda Child

Join Brenda Child, North Shore Readers and Writers Festival author, for an author talk at the Grand Portage National Monument. Brenda is a Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she received the President’s Engaged Scholar Award in 2021. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Brenda is the author of several books in American Indian history, including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award; and Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012). Her 2014 book My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014) won the American Indian Book Award. Brenda was a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian (2013-18) and was President of the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (2017-18). She was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota.