At the University of Minnesota Pattee Hall reopening ceremony Wednesday afternoon, administrators and staff celebrated the American Indian Studies (AIS) Department’s new home.

After renovations, the University’s second oldest operating building will now be home to the AIS Department and the new AIS doctorate program, which is opening applications in 2025.

This new development for the AIS department comes more than a year and a half after the Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing (TRUTH) Report called attention to the University’s “land-grab” history and offered several recommendations to the University to improve relations with local tribes. This report documented wrongdoing from the University throughout its history and gave administrators recommendations for healing the strained relationships.

The AIS Department, founded in 1969, was the first American Indian Studies department in America, according to Department Chair David Aiona Chang.

Chang said this new home for the department marks a turning point for the study at the University.

“Moving to a new level of visibility, moving to a new level of permanence, it marks a real respect for the field and the kind of work that we’re doing,” Chang said. “It’s a signal to students and a signal to the community of how seriously American Indian Studies is taken here at the University of Minnesota.”

Pattee Hall underwent several months of renovations before it reopened as the new home of the AIS Department. Before, it was home to the law school and the Institute for Community Integration.

This is the first time the AIS Department will have its own building on campus.

Previously, the AIS was headquartered in the basement of Scott Hall, which made it difficult for community building on campus, according to several staff members.

Brendon Kishketon, the director of the Ojibwe Language Program at the University, said having their own space on campus will be a big step for establishing community.

Many of the University’s top administrators attended to show their support for the program, with President Rebecca Cunningham, Provost Rachel Croson and College of Liberal Arts Interim Dean Ann Waltner making appearances at the event.

Waltner, who served as the Chair for the Department of History, said the University focused on the AIS Department, knowing the history between the University and local tribes, following the TRUTH report.

“One of the things that the opening of the hall does is that it really establishes the place of American Indian Studies at this University,” Waltner said. “There’s a way in which the University was founded on money from stolen land, and so it’s a small, symbolic gesture to give place to the American Indian Studies department.”

The American Indian history of Pattee Hall is strong, as it graduated the University’s first American Indian law student Edward Lowell Rogers in 1904. Chang said today, his legacy lives on in the rooms he used to study in.