Mindy Morgan

Biography

Dr. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member of the American Indian Studies Program at Michigan State University.  She is the author of “The Bearer of This Letter”: Language Ideologies, Literacy Practices, and the Fort Belknap Indian Community(Nebraska, 2009).  Her book examines how literacy functioned as both a cultural practice and cultural symbol for the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre communities of Fort Belknap reservation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work emerged from her experience as the curriculum coordinator for a collaborative Nakoda language project at Fort Belknap College, Montana. Ethnohistorical research conducted in the course of this project led her to also investigate tribal members’ participation in the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s and early 1940s throughout Montana.  She is currently working on a new project stemming from this New Deal research regarding the periodical, Indians At Work, which was published by the Office of Indian Affairs between 1933 and 1945. Dr. Morgan has also maintained an active research project concerning Ojibwe language maintenance and revitalization programs at the university level, specifically the Ojibwe language program at MSU with which she works in developing language immersive events.  Her varied projects are linked by an interest in how Native communities perceive the relationship between Indigenous languages and English, the impact of dominant language ideologies on the transmission of Indigenous languages, and how communities (both historical and contemporary) have employed these ideologies in language and cultural revitalization efforts. 

In 2009, she served as the interim director of the American Indian Studies Program at MSU; during the 2010-2011 academic year, she served as the interim director of the CIC-American Indian Studies Graduate Consortium. She was selected as a Fulbright Scholar during the 2011-12 academic year and spent one semester teaching at the University of Zadar, Croatia.