At the College of Menominee Nation, we are proud and honored to have people from numerous walks of life brighten our halls. With Faces of CMN, the Institutional Advancement department speaks with staff, faculty, alumni, and students to learn more about them, their lives, and how they help shape the College's legacy.

Could you please give us your basic information: name, title, and a brief descriptor of what you do at CMN?

Yes! So, I’m with the faculty at CMN, mostly in Natural Resources and our Geoscience program, but I also do some research with external partners. I’ve been “different people” at CMN as well, but that’s my current role.

How long have you been with CMN?

In this most recent run, two years. I worked as Sustainability Education Coordinator with the Sustainable Development Institute about ten years ago, for a handful of years, and then I went and did my PhD at the University of Minnesota and did some graduate work with phenology while over there. So, on and off, around ten years.

Are you an alumnus of CMN, and if not, how did you find your way here?

I’m not an alumnus of the College, but I have learned a great deal of things while working at CMN and with the Menominee, in general. The reason I found myself here…that goes back a ways! I’d been moving around itinerantly - undergrad in Madison, then Germany for my master’s, then back in the States doing outdoor education in California and New York City, a couple other places. I started wanting to come back to Wisconsin, and was randomly looking, and for some reason remembered a class that had talked about Menominee forestry. The College had a position opening with the Posoh Project, so I applied, and that was what led me here originally.

What about the College appeals to you now?

I think one of the biggest things is learning from the place itself, and the community. Menominee, more than any other place and people I’ve ever been…their stories go back to before glaciation, which is 10,000 years or more. That care-taking of place, and knowledge about place, and consistent human relationships to place, they’re all really strong, and the forest here is unlike any forest I’ve ever been to. I’ve worked in a lot of different forests, from the Amazon to the redwoods, and this forest in particular has never experienced the kind of amnesia that most forest systems have.

In Wisconsin, for example, most of the forests were cut over in the 1800s, and that’s a really big shock. When you think about ecological and social systems - ecological in particular - when you cut something over, it’s losing its elder trees, soil, plants, animals…and that didn’t happen here. The forest itself is very unique, and learning from that place is something that I value. The people that serve as human translators help.

It makes perfect sense when you say it like that, but I don't think I’ve ever heard amnesia used in that context: the forest quite literally forgetting its history as a process of deforestation. That’s tough.

It’s not usually referred to like that, but it should be. Systems are resilient, so they recover, but it’s like any human or non-human that doesn’t have an elder memory line. It’s missing some stuff!

Just kinda letting that rest in my brain for a second.

Where do you think CMN goes from here? We recently finished our celebration of 30 years, but what do you see as the aspirational “next step” for the College?

That’s an interesting question. CMN is really young, and when I talk to community members, when I think about its positionality in the community and where it’s trying to go as an education system, I think…acknowledging its age is important, and figuring out ways to ground it in those older knowledge systems, while existing in levels of academic needs of bureaucracies. Walking in two ways - well, multiple ways - and two worlds as an education system for and by the reservation, and as a very young institution. If you just look at educational institutions and higher ed in general, CMN is a Land Grant Institution. Those began in the 1860s - UW is a Land Grant Institution - historically black colleges came on in the 1890s, and then in the 1990s, tribal colleges came online, and CMN was one of the first ones. Even as educational institutions, that’s young! 30 years is young. Trying to handle education in a different way, one that honors Indigenous ways of knowing, is something that’s just getting popular. It’s moved a lot in even the last ten years, where people say, “oh yeah, I guess we should do Indigenous land acknowledgments,” is just one of the ways those subtle shifts are occurring.

There was this video that the Sustainability Leadership Cohort did a few years back, and it’s “It’s Old and It’s New,” about mining. That idea is important, in thinking about CMN’s position, where it wants to go. There’s a lot of old stuff, but there’s a lot of new stuff that needs to get figured out from an institutional lens. Again, walking in those two worlds is a good challenge that people will need to think about.

Is there anything you can share as a message of hope and goodwill to the community and students at large?

I don’t feel like I can give people advice, or words of wisdom, anything like that. I’ve worked with my good mentor, Jeff Grignon, quite a bit, and we’ve done some medicine wheel teachings. There’s basically four different directions that begin in the east: you go through different phases, and they have different ages or stages, and that’s really useful when you’re thinking about different points in your life. I feel like I’m in a kind of new phase at CMN, more of an east direction. You can be at multiple points on the medicine wheel: in my personal life, I’m having a baby soon, and that’s a lot of new, but in some senses it’s like a closing of some other chapters, in a more westward direction.

<Laugh> I guess I don’t have good advice, but thinking about where you are in different life phases - academic, personal, professional, familial - they all relate to each other, and figuring out where you’re at in those stages of growth and development is an important thing to do, especially if you’re in new beginning phases. It doesn’t have to do with age or linear time scales, but where you’re positioning yourself and what you’re doing. Maybe some students are graduating, and so that’s an end that also circles back around to new stuff.

We’re all still learning - I’m still learning, and I’m not the best at that reflection. <Laugh>

Speaking of new beginnings, is there anything you’d like to share about something coming down the pipeline for the College?

Yes! The Geoscience program just got approved by the Higher Learning Commission, so we’ll have a new Associate degree program [in Fall of 2024]. It’s really heavy in math and science, and it’s a hard program, there’s no way around that. A lot of hard classes, but it’s also really cool. I’ve done a lot of sciences, from social science, to natural resources, to ecological science, and I think geoscience - I’m still learning it now, actually, so I’ll be learning it along with you - is one of the coolest disciplines of science I’ve come across. It’s about telling stories of the earth, and it actually creates space for Indigenous ways of knowing, probably more so than other sciences I’ve worked in.

My PhD, for example, is in Natural Resource Science and Management, which is totally antithetical to a lot of Indigenous concepts. What is “natural”? Are humans a part of that? It wouldn’t have existed in Indigenous lexicon, and resource is another word like that, thinking of something as a commodity, to be used. A lot of science comes from a really Western way of knowing, gaining knowledge. It hasn’t been very inclusive for Indigenous knowledge systems, and management is something that Indigenous people have been doing forever, but it hasn’t been acknowledged by science until recently. Geoscience as a discipline has a better starting point than most other sciences, where soil and earth are alive, whereas in other sciences they’re seen as abiotic. Geoscience sees the earth as alive and animate, and that animacy is something we can explore.

It should be a pretty cool program! We have a lot of cool partnerships, it’s a two-year program that’s meant for you to be able to transfer to a four-year degree institution, and we’ve been diligent about finding people and cool things to do so that your landing pad is pretty broad. It’s the first Geoscience program at a tribal college! I think it’ll be good.

Thank you so much for your time.