Bemidji teacher Audrey Thayer co-authors book on Indigenous women leaders

Audrey Thayer has spent years in Bemidji classrooms, at city hall and in community work. Now the White Earth Nation enrollee and longtime activist is adding author to a public record that already includes service as the first Indigenous-American woman on the Bemidji City Council and a 2023 Women United Tribute Award.

Her new book with Collette A. Hyman, Weaving Community: Indigenous Women and Leadership in the Twin Cities, is built on nine years of interviews and oral histories with Native American women who helped create and sustain urban Indigenous institutions in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The 180-page paperback focuses on about two dozen Dakota, Anishinaabe and Ho-Chunk women whose work reached into health care, education, media and cultural advocacy.

The Minnesota Historical Society Press says the book centers on contemporary Native American women whose leadership strengthened urban Indigenous communities from the 1960s through the 1990s. The press also says their efforts helped Indigenous people in the Twin Cities live with dignity and cultural integrity while preserving traditions, ceremonies and languages.

Those institutions give the book its weight. The Indian Health Board of Minneapolis says it provided the first health care and services in Minneapolis operated by American Indians for American Indian people. MIGIZI says it began in 1977 as Migizi Communications, Inc. to counter misrepresentations and inaccuracies about Native people in the media, and credits Laura Waterman Wittstock as its first president and cofounder.

The book also highlights Project STAIRS, which the publisher says confronted mistreatment of Native students in public schools and helped lay the groundwork for the University of Minnesota’s American Indian Studies program. The university says that program is the oldest autonomous department of its kind in the country and was first envisioned in 1966.

Thayer’s local ties run through the project. She said some of her 27 first cousins appear in the book, tying the history of Twin Cities institution-building to families and networks that still reach into Beltrami County. The leaders named in the project include Vernell Wabasha, Winifred Jourdain, Bonnie Wallace and Laura Waterman Wittstock.

The book talk scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 16, at Four Pines Bookstore in Bemidji brings that history back to Thayer’s hometown. Another event listing points to a related panel talk at All My Relations Arts, extending the book’s reach beyond Bemidji while keeping its core message close to home: Native women were not just present at the margins of community history, they built much of the infrastructure that remains in place today.