The East Side Freedom Library and the Facilitating Racial Equity Collaborative invite you to the monthly Learning Community: Controversies Around Naming and Renaming with Jennings Mergenthal.

Click this link to join this event on Zoom on November 17th, 2022 at 4:30pm CT.

In the past few years, reckoning around the racist and colonial origins of place names has drawn support as well as controversy. Why have renaming campaigns at Bde Maka Ska and Macalester College been successful, while others at Fort Snelling and the University of Minnesota have not? Join us for a conversation on how place renaming has been used as a tool of colonialism, and how it can be used as a step in the process of decolonization.

Jennings Mergenthal is a former student organizer for Proud Indigenous Peoples for Education who does community centered public history and mapping related work. They have done several historical research projects for Macalester College, the Metropolitan Council, the Lake Street Truth Collective and the Science Museum of Minnesota. In 2020 they authored an anticolonial historical atlas of Minnesota. They currently do collections-related community engagement work at the Science Museum and also, occasionally, puppet shows.