AuTHor THursday: Karen V. Hansen

AuTHor THursday focuses on Karen V. Hansen, professor of women and gender studies at Brandeis University, who will be in the Fargo-Moorhead area this weekend and leading a writing workshop for the RRVWP on Sunday from 2-4pm in the Mandan Room of the Memorial Union on the NDSU campus. 

Karen V. Hansen recently published Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930.  This book “explores life on a remote Indian reservation [Spirit Lake] in the early twentieth century where Scandinavians began homesteading, with the sanction of the U.S. government. In effect, they dispossessed Dakota Sioux while living as their neighbors on the reservation. Based on oral histories with elders and analysis of landownership records, the book explores the land taking and in its wake, the coexistence of two profoundly different peoples as they sought to maintain their language, practice their culture, and honor loyalties to more than one nation” (author website).