Hello, my name is Kaitlyn! For the past semester, I have been extremely lucky to have been the WGS intern in the American Indian Student Center (AISC), working primarily with Dr. Sharity Bassett. Throughout the semester, my work was primarily research-based. I helped organize documents from the National Archive in Kansas City, mainly correspondence between the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington DC and agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Pine Ridge, which is now a small reservation in what is currently called South Dakota. With Dr. Bassett and WGS/MLIS graduate student Eleanor Clement, I was part of a presentation to Carolyn Eichner’s WGS 700 class, titled “Subversion as Resistance, Positionality as Power: Engaging Guarded Materials on Behalf of a Tribal Community”. While my internship has ended for the semester, I am excited to continue this research by being a part of a team to go to the National Archive in Kansas City this January and visit the Pine Ridge Reservation at some point in the spring as part of WGS 411.

There were a couple of readings that I had done in past WGS classes that gave me some background knowledge on Indigenous worldview before I started my internship. In WGS 201, I read Paula Gunn Allen’s “Who is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism”, which was an introduction to what I now understand to be Indigenous worldview when it comes to kinship and identity. It also relates to rematriation, which I learned about in WGS 303: Indigenous Feminisms with Dr. Bassett and was able to apply to the research that I was doing.

It is hard to put into words how much I have changed as a student, and a person, during my internship. I have learned more about indigeneity and my relationship with other living beings (both human and non-human) in the past semester than I have in my entire life. For years, I have done my best to develop a decolonial mindset by educating myself through books and learning from Indigenous people in my life. However, I would not have the depth of knowledge that I do now if it wasn’t for my internship, both from the research that I did and learning from people in the center and their experience.

To conclude, I would like to urge everyone who wants to learn more about Indigenous studies and worldview to engage in language revitalization. It is impossible to engage in decolonization in only English. To learn about the perspective that Indigenous people have of life and relationships, one must learn the language. Because of Margaret Noodin, UWM has a substantial Indigenous language program, offering Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Oneida, all of which are languages spoken in current-day Wisconsin. I was fortunate enough to sit

in on First-Semester Ojibwe as part of my internship, and while I do not have a great grasp on the intro level vocabulary, I have a deeper understanding of Indigenous worldviews because I have a vague understanding of how this worldview is weaved throughout the language. I cannot wait to learn more of the language and further deepen my understanding.