“Sometime during the pandemic (of 1918-20) and its aftermath, women created a medicine dress, a new tradition of healing…the Jingle Dress Dance.” Child explained in a Star Tribune essay, “The tradition spread among many tribal nations on pow-wow circuits across North America. Today, the 200,000 Ojibwe people of the U.S. and Canada remember the pandemic in stories, song and dance, a healing tradition now more than a century old.”

Child is a UMN Professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies and the author of My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation.

Part of NEA Big Read in the St. Croix Valley