Indigenous Reconciliation & Repair: An Interview with Margaret Jacobs & Kevin Abourezk (via Zoom)

Kevin Abourezk (Lakota) and Margaret Jacobs (white settler) are the co-directors of Reconciliation Rising (www.reconciliationrising.org), a multimedia project that showcases the lives and work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the U.S. who are engaged in honestly confronting painful and traumatic histories, promoting meaningful and respectful dialogue between Natives and non-Natives, and creating pathways to reconciliation. In this conversation we’ll discuss what they’ve learned from this work, the history and possibilities for truth and reconciliation, practical examples of repair, and current issues facing Indigenous communities in the U.S.

Tuesday, November 8th, 7 – 8 p.m. CDT. The zoom link will be sent on the morning of the program.

$10/person. Registration ends on Monday, November 7.

Kevin Abourezk, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, is a co-founder and co-director of Reconciliation Rising. Abourezk is an award-winning journalist who spent 18 years as a reporter and editor for the Lincoln Journal Star. He is the winner of the Associated Press’s Best Enterprise Story Award in 2006 and the prestigious Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism from the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families for his reporting on the impact of alcohol sales in Whiteclay, Nebraska to residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Abourezk has spent his career documenting the lives, accomplishments and tragedies of Native American people and in 2017 joined Indianz.com, a Native American news website owned and operated by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. He hosts a bi-weekly podcast for Indianz.com called Indian Times that focuses on Native American news. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of South Dakota and a Master of Arts degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Margaret Jacobs is the co-director of the Reconciliation Rising Project and the author of After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands. She is the Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies and Charles Mach Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Recently she received an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for her project, “Does the United States Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?”She has been researching and writing about Indigenous child removal for over twenty years and has published 35 articles and 4 books. Jacobs also co-directs the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project with Elizabeth Lorang, of UNL’s Libraries, and Susana Geliga (Rosebud Lakota), an Assistant Professor of History and Native Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. The project is dedicated to making the records of this large Indian boarding school in Nebraska accessible to families of those who attended and of raising public awareness about the boarding schools.