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By Michelle Mullowney ’17, from . 

On November 17, St. �������� was honored to welcome author, artist, and activist Marcie Rendon in conversation with St. Kate’s associate professor of education Dawn Quigley, PhD. Sponsored by the Office for Intercultural Engagement, , and the Core Curriculum, the evening constituted St. Kate’s fall 2021 Core Convocation and an event in the .

The following is an excerpt from the conversation between Marcie Rendon, Dawn Quigley, and Anh-Hoa Nguyen, MFA, administrative assistant for the Division of Arts and Humanities. The three authors discussed Rendon’s novel Girl Gone Missing in the context of Native women’s knowledge, representation, and resilience.

Dawn Quigley: I think you wrote a heroine for us, for us Native women and for all women, to stand up, get in there, play pool... One of your quotes that I love is, “Native people need to be heard more.”

Marcie Rendon: Unfortunately, so many people raised in a U.S. educational system don’t know that we still exist; in their mindset we’re still like Dances With Wolves and John Wayne killed us all off. We have a voice, we have a story, we exist, we’re here. There’s this woman, Frances Densmore, who was an ethnomusicologist at the beginning of the 1900s. In one of the books that she wrote for the Smithsonian, she said that Ojibwe people were schizophrenic, because we see and hear things that other people don’t. When I read that as a young person, I was so angry that this woman could just make this blanket indictment against my people — and people value her; she’s in the Smithsonian, so why wouldn’t they believe her? Our way of life was seen as crazy or not real, and it’s very real.

Anh-Hoa Nguyen: And I think that goes back to why we need so many more books by BIPOC authors, because there are so many different ways to understand the world. And when you don’t see your experience represented, you do think you’re crazy, or other people want to make you think that. Dawn has been helping me learn about Indigenous research methods — this idea that just because it’s not in a book or a library, or by someone in the Smithsonian, doesn’t mean that that information isn’t true or valid. You’re utilizing your lived experience.

DQ: “Stories handed down, you can’t use those in a paper” — yes, you actually can! It’s called Indigenous research methodologies: songs, poems, art, looking at the world and expressing them in a different way other than a peer-reviewed article. There’s not one way to write a book, there’s not one way to research.