Honoring Dakota Project Online Community Conversation: Katherine Beane

We are honored to co-present this online conversation led by the Honoring Dakota Project with Katherine Beane, Executive Director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Dr. Kate Beane (Flandreau Santee Sioux Dakota and Muscogee Creek) holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the Executive Director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and serves as adjunct faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is board chair for both Vision Maker Media and Wakan Tipi Awayankapi, and in 2020 was appointed by Governor Walz to serve on the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board (CAAPB), which oversees Capitol complex preservation and development (including public art) in downtown St. Paul. Previously, Kate served on the leadership team at the Minnesota Historical Society where she was the director of Native American Initiatives engaging with both Native communities and tribes and advocating for and implementing Indigenous MN interpretation and involvement at historic sites throughout the state. In 2018 Kate and her father Syd Beane completed a documentary film,Ohiyesa: The Soul of an Indian, which shares the story of her grandfather, writer, reformer, and physician Charles A. Eastman and in 2019 she presented a Minneapolis TEDX talk titled "The Lasting Legacy of Place Names,” which spoke to her family’s work restoring the Dakota name to Bde Maka Ska in south Minneapolis (Bdeota).

Art of the Rural is grateful to collaborate with Honoring Dakota Project, Winona County Historical Society, Engage Winona, and The Cedar Tree Project in the Spillway initiative in Winona, Minnesota, a town located along the Mississippi River in Dakota homelands.

Through support for artists, culture bearers, artisans, and storytellers – alongside the local organizations that support them – Spillway works to create the conditions for engaged projects that honor diverse lived experience, deepen regional relationships, and build rural-urban networks of knowledge-sharing and exchange that will create opportunities for artists, culture bearers, and artisans to thrive and connect with new colleagues and audiences.

We are also grateful for the support of the Chicago Community Foundation.