The Newberry is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Rose Miron as the Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, beginning July 8, 2019.
Dr. Miron comes to the Newberry from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in Minneapolis, where she worked closely with tribal leaders to develop programs aimed at further understanding, addressing, and raising awareness about the inter-generational trauma resulting from experiences at U.S. Indian boarding schools. These schools were a central part of U.S. policy in the 19th and 20th centuries that sought to assimilate Native peoples into American society by removing Native children from their tribal communities and placing them in institutions where they were punished for speaking their Native languages or practicing their traditions and cultures.
Dr. Miron helped plan and run the first national conference on U.S. Indian boarding schools, completed planning and sought funding for a major digital archive, and launched a year-long webinar series to reach new audiences.
Dr. Miron recently completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she worked with distinguished faculty including Jean O’Brien and Kevin Murphy. Her scholarly work focuses on how Native peoples use tribal archives to claim authority over the creation, assembly, and use of their historical materials. Centering on the Mohican Nation of Wisconsin, Dr. Miron shows how Native activism through the creation of archives enables tribal members to craft their own historical narratives and to intervene in public representations of their history.
"With her blend of outreach, scholarship, and deep thinking about the Indigenous experience of archival creation, Dr. Miron will bring a terrific set of experiences to the Newberry,"said Brad Hunt, Vice President for Research and Academic Programs at the Newberry. "For decades, the McNickle Center has been at the forefront of promoting research in Indigenous Studies and engaging Native communities, and we look forward to that work continuing under Dr. Miron’s leadership.”
While at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Miron co-curated an exhibit with Professor Brenda Child and the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation and worked on another digital history project that called attention to the difficult history of Fort Snelling, the site of a U.S. concentration camp that held Dakota prisoners after the 1862 U.S. Dakota War. In her public-facing work, Dr. Miron has emphasized amplifying the voices of Native Americans and confronting historical violence.
Dr. Miron will build on the positive work of McNickle Center Interim Director Susan-Sleeper Smith, Professor of History at Michigan State University, who accomplished a great deal in the past 10 months, including launching the First Nations Film and Video Festival, expanding the Newberry’s support for the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative, and organizing the American Indian Seminar at the Newberry.