Join State Support and your colleagues in Brainerd MN on Wednesday evening, November 6, at 7:00 p.m. as we kick-off the 2024 Legal Services Statewide Conference. Our featured speaker for the first night of the conference is Dr. Anton Treuer (pronounced troy-er), Professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University and author of numerous books.

Dr. Treuer has presented all over the U.S. and the world on his book “Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask,” cultural competency, racial equity, strategies for addressing the “achievement” gap, and tribal sovereignty, history, language, and culture. He has served on many organizational boards and received more than 40 prestigious awards and fellowships including from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Bush Foundation, the First Nations Development Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He is editor of the Oshkaabewis (pronounced o-shkaah-bay-wis) Native Journal, the only academic journal of the Ojibwe language.

In his kick-off plenary, Justice and Healing: A Native American Perspective on Navigating Hypervisibility and Invisibility, Dr. Treuer will lead an exploration of how to connect with and serve Native clients dealing with our legal system. His talk will examine the cultural background critical for engineering healthy connections and professional relationships, historical experiences of Native people, navigating historical and contemporary trauma in fostering positive client relationships, and Indigenous ideas of justice.

Stay tuned for more information about this year’s conference, Bridging Worlds: Community, Culture, and the Work of Legal Aid, at Madden’s Resort on Gull Lake, November 6 - 8, 2024. Registration is set to open in mid-August!