The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County is pleased to announce that Dr. Denise Lajimodiere will present her book Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors at 6 pm on Tues. Nov. 14 at the Hjemkomst Center, 202 1st Ave. N, Moorhead, MN. The event is free and open to the public.
Lajimodiere is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas, Belcourt, ND. She was recently named North Dakota’s first Native American Poet Laureate. She worked for 44 years in education as an elementary education teacher, principal, and professor, earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the University of North Dakota. She retired as an associate professor from the School of Education, Education Leadership program at North Dakota State University. She is one of the founders of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
Lajimodiere is speaking at the opening reception of the NEH traveling exhibit Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, which will be up at the museum at the Hjemkomst Center from Nov. 10 through Jan. 7. For information on admission hours and rates, see www.hcscconline.org
This exhibition explores off-reservation boarding schools in its kaleidoscope of voices. Visitors will explore compelling photographs, artwork, interviews, interactive timelines, and immersive environments, including classroom and dormitory settings. Objects such as a period barber chair and a young Seminole girl’s skirt, as well as reproduction elements poignantly illuminate first-person accounts. Stories of tragedy and familial love and friendships intersect. Experiences of gaining things useful and beautiful out of education, despite a formidable, fifty-year agenda that mostly maligned Native American capabilities, call us closer; each trial, each turning of power seeded in human survival, strengthening Indigenous identity.
This exhibition is made possible by NEH on the Road, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was adapted from the permanent exhibition, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, organized by The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
