Brenda J. Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) is Northrop Professor and former Chair of the Departments of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. in History that she received from the University of Iowa in 1993. In 2021, Child was the University of Minnesota’s recipient of the President’s Community Engaged Scholar Award.

She is the author of several award-winning books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998); Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012); and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014). Overall, Child’s scholarship focuses on gender, labor, and family life in the Great Lakes and the history of Indigenous education.