McNair Scholar 2023 Eileen Bass
Eileen Bass is a junior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, double majoring in English and Anthropology, minoring in Creative Writing. Her research interests involve concepts of Native sovereignty and their relationship with urban Indian experiences and cultural revitalization. Ms. Bass plans on getting her Ph.D. in English.
My dream is incorporate imaginative solutions for the historical storytelling of my tribal communities, and to receive a Ph.D. in English. I want to write works of fiction and non-fiction for Native audiences, emphasizing our traditional and ceaseless connections with our role in our homelands. The natural world, relationality, sovereignty, and kinship will feature in my future writings and orations.
Research project
Dakota Activism and Sovereignty in Minneapolis Following the Post-WWII Era of Urban Indian Relocation Policies
Abstract: Minneapolis and Bdé Óta Othúŋwe co-exist as a city with urban relocation history and contemporary cultural renewal within the Dakota community. The post-World War II generation experienced an assimilation project in Minneapolis: to integrate Indigenous peoples into mainstream white American society. This largely disadvantaged population experienced economic, social, and cultural discrimination. In the late 1960s, the American Indian Movement was one of several responses to the unfair treatment of the urban Native population, in issues related to housing, schools, and geographical engineering. What is less studied are the Dakota activism efforts in response to sovereignty in a settler city that is understood to be the homelands of Dakota peoples. The assimilationist efforts from the past were meant to contribute to cultural loss, dislocation, and political struggles for Native populations. Dakota activism has been building from a need to reestablish tribal sovereignty within a settler colonial city in Dakota homelands.
Faculty mentor
Nick Estes is an assistant professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Estes attended the University of New Mexico, where he received his Ph.D. in American Studies in 2017. His research focuses on Oceti Sakowin studies, federal Indian law and policy, Indigenous internationalism, environmental and social justice, US settler colonialism and imperialism, and Indigenous oral histories. Dr. Estes is published in multiple research journals and has presented his work at conferences nationwide. This is Dr. Estes’s first year as a McNair faculty mentor.