Brenda J. Child

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. She was the University’s recipient of the President’s Community Engaged Scholar Award in 2021. Child holds a PhD in History from the University of Iowa and is the author of several award-winning books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998); Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012); and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014). It won the American Indian Book Award. She is the author of a best-selling book for children, Bowwow Powwow (2018). Her new book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country. Child was a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian and was President of the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association. She was consultant to a major exhibit about American Indian Boarding School Stories at the Heard Museum. Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota.