Brenda Child by Richard G. Anderson
The University of Minnesota, Crookston will host its annual Ice Cream Social on Wednesday, August 15 to kick off the 2012 Ox Cart Days celebration. The social will take place from 2 to 4:30 p.m. on the Campus Mall and will provide free ice cream and musical performances by the Valley Fiddlers under the direction of Val Buchmeier. The event will also feature a reading and book signing by author Brenda Child at 3 p.m. and the Ox Cart Days Medallion Hunt clue will be announced at 4 p.m. KROX AM 1260 will be broadcasting live from 2 to 4 p.m. during the social.
Child will share about her most recent work Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community, which explores the remarkable role of women in holding together Native American communities through the hardest years of the 
last two centuries. The UMC Bookstore will have the books available for purchase and will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. State Fair admission tickets will also be available at the UMC Bookstore for $9.00 each.
A member of the Red Lake Ojibwe tribe herself, Child is a leading scholar in this area, and she brings readers a fascinating new angle on Native Americans. The subject of women is vastly underexplored in literature on American Indians, even though much about Indian religion is matriarchal, and women themselves often held significant power within Indian communities from their importance in the fur trade, harvesting, farming and keeping the community together.
She is the chair of American Indian Studies and associate professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is consulting editor for the Penguin Library of American Indian History. Her other work includes the book Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000.
