Native Americans

Margaret Jacobs is the Charles Mach Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is of settler background and collaborates with Rosebud Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk on Reconciliation Rising (reconciliationrising.org), a multimedia project that showcases Indigenous people and settlers who are working together to honestly confront painful and traumatic histories, promote meaningful and respectful dialogue between Natives and non-Natives, and create pathways to reconciliation. Margaret is also the co-founder and co-director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project at UNL. This project locates and makes available all the government records related to the Genoa school as an act of archival reconciliation of bringing history home to tribal nations. The project aims to support descendant communities in telling more complete stories of Genoa and to promote awareness and truth-seeking about the boarding schools among all Americans. Margaret has published more than 35 articles and 4 books, primarily about the U.S. government’s policy and practice of Indigenous child removal and family separation for over a century. She published “After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands” with Princeton University Press in 2021.

Jessica A. Shoemaker is a law professor with expertise in the legal rules of land ownership, with particular emphasis on issues of agricultural land ownership, Indigenous land governance, and rural private and public land issues more generally.

Katrina Jagodinsky is Susan J. Rosowski Professor of History. She is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West. She has published a book and a number of articles and essays that examine the efforts of Indigenous and mixed-race women and children to leverage the American legal system in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Jagodinsky holds a Ph.D. in History (2011) and M.A. in American Indian Studies (2004) from the University of Arizona, and she earned her B.A. (2002) from Lawrence University.

Nancy Engen-Wedin is the program manger at the Lied Center for Performing Arts and coordinator for the Indigenous Roots teacher education program. Since 2001 she has helped the university receive three federal grants, one of which helped endorse 50 Native American paraprofessionals to become certified teachers and work in the K-12 reservation school communities in Northeast Nebraska (Santee, Omaha Nation, Winnebago and Walthill Public Schools).