Molly McGlennen - Vassar

[Advanced Smite]

I came across Molly McGlennen while researching Margaret Noodin. Molly is a professor at Vassar and identifies as Ojibwe. She’s from Minnetonka, Minnesota. Does anyone have more information?

[Sparks]

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/nyregion/a-review-of-decolonizing-the-exhibition-at-vassar-college-in-poughkeepsie.html

"Molly McGlennen, assistant professor of English and Native ... who is originally from Minnesota and whose mother is Ojibwa …".

Only place I found where the mother's ethnicity is mentioned. Everything else seems more diffuse and distant, almost always "Anishinaabe (or Ojibwa or Ojibwe) and European descent". (Note, it's not a quote from herself, the NYT may have got it wrong?)

Anyhow, hat one ought to be easy for a genealogist?

[Diana]

I can't read the article. NYT wants me to buy a subscription before I'm allowed read it. Maybe you should post the whole article so everyone can read it. We usually post the whole article because a lot of times the articles...dissapear, get old and get taken down. Thanks!

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/nyregion/a-review-of-decolonizing-the-exhibition-at-vassar-college-in-poughkeepsie.html

"Molly McGlennen, assistant professor of English and Native ... who is originally from Minnesota and whose mother is Ojibwa …".

Only place I found where the mother's ethnicity is mentioned. Everything else seems more diffuse and distant, almost always "Anishinaabe (or Ojibwa or Ojibwe) and European descent". (Note, it's not a quote from herself, the NYT may have got it wrong?)

Anyhow, hat one ought to be easy for a genealogist?

[Sparks]

I can't read the article. NYT wants me to buy a subscription before I'm allowed read it. Maybe you should post the whole article so everyone can read it. We usually post the whole article because a lot of times the articles...dissapear, get old and get taken down. Thanks!

OK, here goes (my bolding of phrases I quoted in contracted form; pictures and captions not included):

Arts Review | Westchester
Calling It Art, Not ‘Native American Art’
By Sylviane Gold — Jan. 17, 2014

One is a picture of a jaunty red bra — just a bra — distilled to its basic geometric elements, including the little white tag peeking out from behind one strap. The other still life, by the same artist, depicts the simplified form of a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

Both objects are set against a colored void, abstracting them and depriving them of scale and solidity. With their graphic bluntness, they comment humorously on each other and on their shared binary design, their symmetry and their similar yet incongruous functions.

But Molly McGlennen, assistant professor of English and Native American studies at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, likes them because it’s almost impossible to guess who made them from either their style or their content. Part of a small, student-curated exhibition at the college’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the prints are the work of an Inuit artist in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, in Canada’s Far North.

“We have these expectations of what native people should be thinking about, should be rendering,” Professor McGlennen said recently in an interview. “I like ‘Pitseolak’s Glasses’ and ‘35/36’ because they don’t necessarily register in a viewer’s eye or mind as ‘native art.’ These two pieces unsettle people’s preconceived notions about what native art should be or look like.”

With only eight works on view, “Decolonizing the Exhibition: Contemporary Inuit Prints and Drawings From the Edward J. Guarino Collection” nonetheless manages to survey a wide range of what Inuit works on paper can look like — figurative, abstract, totemic, mysterious. Mr. Guarino’s holdings, some 1,000 objects amassed over a 34-year career as a high school teacher in Westchester, also include pottery, beadwork, textiles and carvings, from the tribal peoples of North, South and Central America. Over the years, he has brought many of them to Professor McGlennen’s Native American studies classes and donated about 200 to the Loeb.

Mr. Guarino, who first became interested in Native American art on a boyhood visit to the Iroquois Indian Museum, then in Schoharie, N.Y., and Professor McGlennen, who is originally from Minnesota and whose mother is Ojibwa, share a passion for changing the way native art is perceived by the wider culture. In one of their conversations, Mr. Guarino recalled recently, they fantasized about mounting “an exhibit where the art would not be presented through an ethnographic or anthropological lens, and where the visitors would be guided to confront these artworks as contemporary works of art.”

They decided that one way to initiate such an exhibition was to connect it to a course, which is how “Decolonizing the Exhibition” made its way into the Loeb, where it runs through Feb. 2. They chose to focus the show on a narrow slice of the collection, Professor McGlennen said, to encourage both the students and the public to view “the visual culture of indigenous peoples in tribally specific ways.”

The course’s 15 students spent the fall semester studying contemporary Native American art from the perspective of Native American studies (rather than art history) and analyzing and researching the 15 works selected by Mr. Guarino and Professor McGlennen. After comparing the way mainstream museums display such work with the approach favored by tribal institutions, like the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the students wrote (and rewrote) the wall labels for the eight pieces at the Loeb and the seven included in the expanded, online version of the show.

One of the students, Pilar Jefferson, took the course as a way to combine her major, art history, with her minor, Native American studies. A 20-year-old junior from Massachusetts, she worked on the exhibition’s earliest print, “Animals Out of Darkness,” a striking 1961 stonecut by the seminal Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak and her husband, Johnniebo, and a coolly minimalist 2008 diptych by Itee Pootoogook, “Two Seasons.” Ms. Jefferson found the class particularly useful, she said, because it freed her to think about native art in a new way: “I was so stuck in that art-history brain,” she said. ‘I learned that the relationship between Western people and native people and art and museums is all very, very complicated.”

Ms. Ashevak and Kananginak Pootoogook, represented in the show by a delicately colored, wall-size drawing of traditionally clad walrus hunters and their prey, were part of the first generation of Cape Dorset artists, taught Western printmaking techniques in the 1950s, after the Canadian government settled the once-nomadic Inuit into villages.

The sometimes frightful legacy of other such encounters with the dominant culture can be seen in a pair of emotionally loaded 2010 etchings, “The Student” and “The Day After,” in which Jamasie Pitseolak recalls his abuse at the hands of a boarding-school teacher.

“It was important to have these pieces,” Professor McGlennen said, to illustrate her “decolonizing” theme and to convey the evolution of Inuit printmaking. “You go from ‘Animals Out of the Darkness,’ the sort of quintessential Inuit print, to something political and confrontational and jarring.”

As for Mr. Guarino, he said he was content to have even a small part of his collection on display. “Any way I can get the art exposed and in front of the public, I’m happy to do it,” he said. “I spent so many years educating people. It seems fitting that the collection continue teaching.”

There is one in-text link: https://pages.vassar.edu/amst282/ [“Decolonizing the Exhibition"; free access.]

[cellophane]

This is what I've come up with so far. Locations are given as Hennepin County, Minnesota, unless otherwise noted or specified more exactly. All information is as reliable as Ancestry.com. Birth dates for living people omitted for privacy.

I can't find any ancestors who aren't European immigrants. A couple are uncertain (Great-great-grandfathers Henry Case and Alexander Demars) but not from the area.

I only looked at her mother's family, since she said her mother is Ojibwe.

Molly Suzanne McGlennen (1971—)
-F Michael Howard McGlennen (1942—)
-M Jacquline Katherine Roskop (1946—)
--F Bernard Francis Roskop (5/2/1920 Plymouth — 12/5/1991 Mnpls)
---F Frank Raskop (2/9/1893 Mnpls — 12/5/1954) Parents born in Germany
---M Katherine (Catherine) Smith (3/26/1887 Mpls — 9/1/1973 Mnpls)
----F Nicholas Smith (1857 MN — 3/6/1950) Parents born in Germany
----M Mary Elizabeth Dynes (1860 Ireland — 7/30/1924)
--M Shirley Melina Case (8/27/1920 Hennepin — 5/20/2010 Hamel)
---F Toby Leslie Case (12/5/1886, MN — 11/1/1981, Loretto)
----F Henry Case (1852, Ohio — ?)
----M Sarah Hatcher (abt. 1856—) parents born in England
---M Leonie M Demarse/Leona M Demars (1/10/1892—9/19/1965)
----F Alexander Demars (Dumas) (1843 Québec—6/9/1928)
----M Marguerite Francoise Lasarte (4/18/1870, Corcoran — 11/1/1944 Mnpls)
-----F François (Frank) Noel Lasarte (LeCerte) (12/24/1835 St. Francois Xavier, White Horse Plain, Manitoba—9/14/1918 Aitkin, MN) Parents born in France
-----M Leone Charpentier (1834 France — 1923 Ironton, MN)

[Advanced Smite]

Thank you, Sparks! Molly McGlennen’s background story is similar to Margaret Noodin which piqued my interest. I hadn’t been able to find a source that stated whether her maternal or paternal side is Ojibwe so I’d been working through both sides. The article you shared is very helpful. Her Great Great Great Grandfather, Francis Lasart (born 1835), is listed as “half blood” in the 1875 Minnesota Census. His wife and children are listed as white. In every other census I’ve looked at so far, Francis and the family are listed as white. It is possible Molly may have negligible ancestry but I need to work through Francis’ family more to confirm. Every other ancestor clearly goes back to Europe. Molly’s writings certainly depict a different story than her family tree. While blood quantum and family tree don’t always tell the whole story of a person/family, there is something that feels off. I’m on mobile but will try to share some excerpts from interviews later.

I can't read the article. NYT wants me to buy a subscription before I'm allowed read it. Maybe you should post the whole article so everyone can read it. We usually post the whole article because a lot of times the articles...dissapear, get old and get taken down. Thanks!

OK, here goes (my bolding of phrases I quoted in contracted form; pictures and captions not included):

Arts Review | Westchester
Calling It Art, Not ‘Native American Art’
By Sylviane Gold — Jan. 17, 2014

One is a picture of a jaunty red bra — just a bra — distilled to its basic geometric elements, including the little white tag peeking out from behind one strap. The other still life, by the same artist, depicts the simplified form of a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

Both objects are set against a colored void, abstracting them and depriving them of scale and solidity. With their graphic bluntness, they comment humorously on each other and on their shared binary design, their symmetry and their similar yet incongruous functions.

But Molly McGlennen, assistant professor of English and Native American studies at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, likes them because it’s almost impossible to guess who made them from either their style or their content. Part of a small, student-curated exhibition at the college’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the prints are the work of an Inuit artist in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, in Canada’s Far North.

“We have these expectations of what native people should be thinking about, should be rendering,” Professor McGlennen said recently in an interview. “I like ‘Pitseolak’s Glasses’ and ‘35/36’ because they don’t necessarily register in a viewer’s eye or mind as ‘native art.’ These two pieces unsettle people’s preconceived notions about what native art should be or look like.”

With only eight works on view, “Decolonizing the Exhibition: Contemporary Inuit Prints and Drawings From the Edward J. Guarino Collection” nonetheless manages to survey a wide range of what Inuit works on paper can look like — figurative, abstract, totemic, mysterious. Mr. Guarino’s holdings, some 1,000 objects amassed over a 34-year career as a high school teacher in Westchester, also include pottery, beadwork, textiles and carvings, from the tribal peoples of North, South and Central America. Over the years, he has brought many of them to Professor McGlennen’s Native American studies classes and donated about 200 to the Loeb.

Mr. Guarino, who first became interested in Native American art on a boyhood visit to the Iroquois Indian Museum, then in Schoharie, N.Y., and Professor McGlennen, who is originally from Minnesota and whose mother is Ojibwa, share a passion for changing the way native art is perceived by the wider culture. In one of their conversations, Mr. Guarino recalled recently, they fantasized about mounting “an exhibit where the art would not be presented through an ethnographic or anthropological lens, and where the visitors would be guided to confront these artworks as contemporary works of art.”

They decided that one way to initiate such an exhibition was to connect it to a course, which is how “Decolonizing the Exhibition” made its way into the Loeb, where it runs through Feb. 2. They chose to focus the show on a narrow slice of the collection, Professor McGlennen said, to encourage both the students and the public to view “the visual culture of indigenous peoples in tribally specific ways.”

The course’s 15 students spent the fall semester studying contemporary Native American art from the perspective of Native American studies (rather than art history) and analyzing and researching the 15 works selected by Mr. Guarino and Professor McGlennen. After comparing the way mainstream museums display such work with the approach favored by tribal institutions, like the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the students wrote (and rewrote) the wall labels for the eight pieces at the Loeb and the seven included in the expanded, online version of the show.

One of the students, Pilar Jefferson, took the course as a way to combine her major, art history, with her minor, Native American studies. A 20-year-old junior from Massachusetts, she worked on the exhibition’s earliest print, “Animals Out of Darkness,” a striking 1961 stonecut by the seminal Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak and her husband, Johnniebo, and a coolly minimalist 2008 diptych by Itee Pootoogook, “Two Seasons.” Ms. Jefferson found the class particularly useful, she said, because it freed her to think about native art in a new way: “I was so stuck in that art-history brain,” she said. ‘I learned that the relationship between Western people and native people and art and museums is all very, very complicated.”

Ms. Ashevak and Kananginak Pootoogook, represented in the show by a delicately colored, wall-size drawing of traditionally clad walrus hunters and their prey, were part of the first generation of Cape Dorset artists, taught Western printmaking techniques in the 1950s, after the Canadian government settled the once-nomadic Inuit into villages.

The sometimes frightful legacy of other such encounters with the dominant culture can be seen in a pair of emotionally loaded 2010 etchings, “The Student” and “The Day After,” in which Jamasie Pitseolak recalls his abuse at the hands of a boarding-school teacher.

“It was important to have these pieces,” Professor McGlennen said, to illustrate her “decolonizing” theme and to convey the evolution of Inuit printmaking. “You go from ‘Animals Out of the Darkness,’ the sort of quintessential Inuit print, to something political and confrontational and jarring.”

As for Mr. Guarino, he said he was content to have even a small part of his collection on display. “Any way I can get the art exposed and in front of the public, I’m happy to do it,” he said. “I spent so many years educating people. It seems fitting that the collection continue teaching.”

There is one in-text link: https://pages.vassar.edu/amst282/ [“Decolonizing the Exhibition"; free access.]

[cellophane]

According to the baptism certificate, here (if you have Ancestry),
https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61513/images/FS_005472546_00030?pId=10238

François Noël Laserte was the son of Louis Laserte and of [first name left blank] Martin. He must be then the brother of this Louis Lacerte:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Lacerte

And therefore child of Louis Lacerte Sr. and Marie 'Josephte' Martin, both Métis.

See also here:
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lecerte-2

[Sparks]

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/nyregion/a-review-of-decolonizing-the-exhibition-at-vassar-college-in-poughkeepsie.html
"Molly McGlennen, assistant professor of English and Native ... who is originally from Minnesota and whose mother is Ojibwa …".

Only place I found where the mother's ethnicity is mentioned. Everything else seems more diffuse and distant, almost always "Anishinaabe (or Ojibwa or Ojibwe) and European descent". (Note, it's not a quote from herself, the NYT may have got it wrong?)

I only looked at her mother's family, since she said her mother is Ojibwe.

My bolding in quotes. I put in a caveat since I could (so far) find no place where Molly McGlennen herself distinctly makes an ethnic claim about her mother.

[cellophane]

Quite right. Thanks for catching this. I relied on the NYT account.

[cellophane]

From her poem, She's Nothing like we Thought, in Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing (p. 244):

8 helps her mother cook wild rice, has known the recipe, never spoken,
             since she was small; her hair pulled into a ponytail.

That suggests that the NYT had it accurately.

Most of that chapter is here. There are other hints there as well:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Nuq9a09sJfoC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA244#v=onepage&q&f=false

[cellophane]

The first page is here. I think she's writing about herself:
https://books.google.com/books?id=DtqkCQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA243#v=onepage&q&f=false

1 is a troubled breed, traces bloodlines
             to Anishinaabe grandmother with her right hand,
             a French grandfather with her left.