 Are you going to sit with me? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah? Can you sit with me? Yeah, we're sitting right on the front there. It says reserve, but we're right behind them. Are you going to sit right here? Are you going to sit right in the drop? Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Okay. Wow. We've got to get a professional photographer. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, we'll be back to the right side. We've got Jim here. I'm Jim here. I'm Jim from the last time we were here. We're a black car. Oh, okay. We're going to put our cameras out in the background. So everybody's going to be here. Do that, Ben. Yes, sir. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay, Jim. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Okay, Jim. Yeah. It's a right. Right again. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. No, we have our guide over here. Come here, let us get him. Let me drag it. You guys don't be running around. Please go get him. I'm sorry. What up? I'm talking number 111. I'm starting out. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much for being here. We're far away. Yeah, are we at? How's it going? Yeah, what's up? Oh, yeah. You guys are just up that way? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, why don't you jump later though? Huh? Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to go live. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they're looking for. We don't know all around over there. We're closer to them. Oh, yeah, that's the old man. I would like to learn how to make this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is that problem. You've made the job really. Yeah. Best side. Sips. Long stick. I'm going to have to make them before those. Well, Oakdale plays a really cool stick stuff in it. I think we can run those now. us on this incredibly special occasion. Please silence your mobile devices. We will now begin our ceremony. Please stand for the posting of colors and grand entry. Our members of the stage party. It is my privilege to introduce our honored guest Karen Lincoln-Michelle and the 24th president of Marquette University, Dr. Michael Lovell. And thank you for joining us in this special celebration today. My name is Chris Melvia and I am the vice president for Inclusive Excellence and will serve as your emcee for today's program. It is indeed a pleasure to welcome members of the Marquette community and our community friends to this grand occasion as we honor Karen Lincoln-Michelle. I would like to ask members of the Marquette University Leadership Council who are here with us today to please stand to introduce Reverend James Kreebeck of the Society of Jesus and Vice President of Mission and Ministry and Elder Vernon Ultimate to offer a blessing for today's gathering. We thank you for bringing us here tonight to honor Karen Lincoln-Michelle and the way she has made a difference for Indigenous people, for all North Americans and even beyond. We recall that in the words of St. John's Gospel, your son became a word, a word that gives life, light and liberation. And all who work with words continue this sacred mission. We pray that everything we say, print and express through our lives may serve to connect, to heal and to enlighten. May our university always be a place where cultures and ideas meet, dialogue and harmonize. May we be of one mind and heart on all the positive values we uphold and on the common desire for love and freedom that we all share. Help our hearts to beat as one tonight and always as we journey together through time and experience and eventually to you and to all those who have gone before us in faith and in loving service. In you we trust. And in union with holy people everywhere, we pray on this joyous and sacred evening. Amen. My sister here for her honorary degree. I say thank you. I am known as Turtle. I come from the Turtle Clan and I'm currently the elder in residence over at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I ask the Creator to bless us, be kind to us, listen to our words. I'm grateful for these songs that these elders over here are saying for us tonight. I ask the Creator to bless everyone here because you're waiting to mission home. Thank you Father Priebeck and Elder Ultimone. At this time I'd like to invite Alex Liberado, a 2021 alum from the Marquette College of Business to read our land and water acknowledgement. As we gather here today, we are mindful that our campus in Milwaukee are the homelands and waters of the Menominee, Pottawatomate, Ho-Chunk, Fox, Mescuton, Sok and Ojibwe nations who have known these lands and waters as relatives for millennia and whose descendants alongside many other tribal nation members remain our hosts. We are mindful of our responsibility to practice good relations with the land and water as elders and ancestors past, present and emerging have done. Our responsibility entails acknowledging these cultural traditions that inform good stewardship of our environment and practicing ongoing good relations with the sovereign nations who care for it. In the spirit of reconciliation, we can authentically create the conditions of hospitality for current Indigenous students and community members and all yet to walk with us. Thank you Alex. To begin the conferring of the honorary degree I'd like to introduce Jacqueline Fontaine-Schramp, Marquette Director of Public Affairs and Special Assistant for Native American Affairs and Sandra Whitehead, Journalist and Longtime Adjunct Instructor of Journalism in the College of Communication. President Lovell, Sandra and I commend to you Karen Lincoln-Michelle. Karen Lincoln-Michelle has been recognized nationally for advancing diversity in news coverage and newsroom staffing through her distinguished career as an editor, publisher, writer and reporter. Most notably, her leadership as president of ICT, formerly Indian Country Today, has transformed a traditional newspaper into a sustainable non-profit news organization expressed through a daily digital platform and a weekly newscast. Now based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University, the new ICT produces quality journalism for and about America's Indigenous people at a time when their identities are misrepresented or made invisible in mainstream media. Under Michelle's leadership, ICT also formed a separate non-profit organization Indige Public Media to serve as its parent company. As its CEO, she helped the organization gain its 501C3 designation from the IRS, thus ensuring ICT's independence and financial viability. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Michelle began her work as a reporter for the Cross Tribune. She wrote for the Dallas Morning News before becoming assistant managing editor for the Green Bay Press Gazette, an executive director at two Louisiana newspapers. She went on to edit Madison Magazine. Besides these outlets, her articles as a freelance journalist have appeared in the Washington Post, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Columbia Journalism Review, Native Americas, and the American India. ICT has a national focus and an international following. Also on the national level, Michelle served as the first female president of the Native American Journalists Association and then completed two terms as president of Unity, Journalists of Color, the largest organization of journalists in the country at the time. She has served on the editorial board of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society's magazine, Winds of Change, her column for the New York Times Syndicate's New America News Service, and her blog, Digital Native Americans, have spoken to broad audiences. Here in her home state, she has led the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Board of Directors. She has also joined the editorial board of WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate in Madison. For years, she covered state politics for the Green Bay newspaper, and she's a current member of the Friends Board of PBS Wisconsin. Michelle is an active alumna of Marquette's Dietrich College of Communication. In 2018, she invited her longtime mentor, Arthur Oaks Salzberger, Jr., former publisher of the New York Times, to visit Marquette and hold a session with journalism faculty and students on the state of journalism today. She continues to hire, develop, and mentor young journalists. Michelle embodies the Jesuit educational ideals of other centeredness, and the pursuit of faith, justice, and reconciliation. She also witnesses to the enduring relevance of eloquencia perfecta, the Jesuit tradition of whole human beings speaking, writing, and acting for the common good. For her outstanding service of God, nation, tribe, state, and alma mater, we ask you present level to award Karen Lincoln-Michel, the Marquette University Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. Honoris causa. Karen Lincoln-Michel, by the power vested in me by the state of Wisconsin, and the trustees of Marquette University, I confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Karen Lincoln-Michel, the champion of diverse voices in a Marquette alumni, of whom we are so very proud. Thank you for that warm and generous introduction. Good evening, everyone, and a special good evening to Dr. Michael Lovell, members of the Marquette University faculty and staff, the University Leadership Council, Reverend Pruebeck, Elder Altman, Ho-Chunk Nation President Marlon Whiteigal, the Sanford Whiteigal Legion Post, the Thunder Cloud Singers, my Ho-Chunk relatives, distinguished guests, and friends. I have a daily practice in the morning that involves prayer, meditation, and visioning. In that time, I imagine my day and many times imagine my world as I would like to see it. In all the days of my daily practice, I never envisioned an honor like this would be handed to me, and in such a beautiful ceremony as this one. The best way that I can describe how I felt when I learned that I had been selected to receive this honorary doctorate degree is like being stomped in my tracks by a bolt of lightning, striking in front of me with fury and force. That happened to me in real life. I was traveling alone by car from Wisconsin to Nebraska to attend the funeral of one of my relatives whose mother comes from the Thunder Clan of my Ho-Chunk people. She is a grandmother of mine in our Ho-Chunk kinship, and she is in the audience tonight. Her name is Carol Blackhawk. I asked her if it was okay if I mentioned the name of her daughter, Julia Blackhawk, and she said I could. Julia's life ended when the I-35 bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in 2007. Julia was on her way home from work, and she had just talked to her mother by phone about dinner plans. Then everything changed in an instant. My heart went out to Julia's children and all my Blackhawk relatives, and I wanted to be with them. On the way to the funeral, I drove at night through this colossal thunderstorm. The wind whipped so hard that it made the rain come down sideways. There was lightning in all directions, and some of them looked like jagged lightsabers that were thrown down from the sky. One of the lightning strikes came down no more than 50 yards ahead of me on the side of the road in rural Iowa. By then, I had slowed down the car to a crawl. When that lightning bolt hit, I could have sworn I felt the ground shake. I stopped the car and immediately I saw something above me, like a cloud spinning, and I wondered if it was a funnel cloud, and I thought if this is a funnel cloud, this is it for me. But it turned out to be smoke from the lightning strike that was stirred up by all the wind. So for the longest time, my heart was pounding and my hands were trembling, but I kept driving and I got through the storm, and I didn't quite know what just happened, but it was stunning as much as it was exhilarating, and I knew it was an experience that would stay with me always and give me strength and power, but also gratitude and humility. That's how I feel again through being awarded this Doctor of Humane Letters. What makes this degree even more meaningful is that it is given by a great educational institution that has done so much for me. Marquette University opened up a new lens from which I could view the world. My professors here taught me theories about journalism and communications and how to apply them in my work. They showed me how to be an independent thinker and inspired me to do my part to try to make the world a better place, and there are a few of them are here tonight Dr. Sharon Murphy who is instrumental in bringing me to Marquette and whose book Let My People Know was and still is one of the very few published works that documents the history of American Indian journalism. I also want to mention two other professors who were great influences on me, Dr. James Scotton and Dr. Robert Griffin whom we affectionately call Dr. Bob. Through Marquette I gained lifelong friends and some of them are here tonight. We study together, laugh together, sometimes cry together, but always supported each other and encouraged each other on this road of life, and we continue to get together as often as we can. One of them in particular is my beautiful friend Sandra Whitehead who along with my new friend Jacqueline Stram nominated me for this prestigious honor. I will never know what prompted them to think of me in this way and go through the long nomination process, but I'm deeply moved and I treasure both of you. In looking back on my days at Marquette one of the best takeaways along with my diploma was finding the man who would be my husband and my life partner, Roberto Michelle. We met on the fifth floor graduate lounge of Johnston Hall which was the home away from home for many of my fellow journalism grad students. Roberto graduated a year before me and we were married in 1990, so Roberto I just want to say thank you for your love, strength, your caring ways, and your constant support. I'm deeply honored to be receiving this honorary degree during Marquette's mission week which at its heart is about demonstrating devotion to God. From my earliest memories my parents taught me about God, Mauna or Earthmaker and how he is central to life and everything we do and believe in. You could say that my parents were God-fearing people. I was 10 years old when my father passed into the spirit world. My mother, God rest her soul, gave me a Bible at that time and said I should read it to help give me comfort and understanding. I asked her where I should begin and she suggested read Proverbs. I remember reading Proverbs chapter 9 verse 10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Those words touched my spirit and perhaps that was the true beginning of my education. It was probably fate that eventually led me to Marquette. The words go and set the world on fire are associated with Saint Ignatius who in the 1500s founded the Society of Jesus. You could say that setting the world on fire was the kind of message we got as we graduated from journalism school at Marquette more than three decades ago. I remember just before I was about to graduate Dr. Jim Scotton who was then the head of the journalism graduate program asked me how my job search was going. I told him I saw an ad for a communications specialist and I was thinking of applying and he said something like this, anyone with good writing skills can get a job like that. You need to work at a newspaper. If you do well you can go anywhere because of the skills you'll have. So he made me stop and think and then several months later a reporting position became open at the La Crosse Tribune which is a newspaper owned by Lee Enterprises and not far from my hometown of Toma. I applied and I got the job. My first week at the paper was grueling. I learned the meaning of the word deadline. At the end of that first week I remember looking around the newsroom and thinking wow I really respect all these people for what they do every day. I could see that they were fulfilling an important need to let people know what was happening in their community and giving them vital information to make informed choices. Since then I've had the great fortune to work in different newsrooms across the country and work with a lot of good journalists and news industry people but one of the great challenges I faced was the lack of diversity. I was often the only Indigenous person in the newsroom and sometimes the only person of color or one of very few. Through the Native American Journalist Association and a group that was called Unity Journalists of Color I worked with other similar minded people to try to convince news organizations to hire more journalists of color at every level of their company. We also pushed for more accurate news coverage of communities of color. It was and still is a worthy goal. Although we made some strides America's newsrooms still lack diversity. According to the Pew Research Center newsrooms are 77% white. It was often tough to have frank and open discussions about the need to diversify our workforces at some of the places I worked. Nothing would silence the room quicker than when I would say the only way to turn things around is to hire more people of color and key decision-making roles. Real and lasting change begins at the top. I was publisher and executive editor of Madison Magazine when my dear friend and colleague Mark Trahan who is in the audience asked me about joining his ambitious startup known then as Indian Country Today. It is now called ICT and it was originally started in 1981 by the late legendary journalist Tim Gallego as the Locota Times. The newspaper had readership beyond South Dakota and Tim later changed the papers name to Indian Country Today to reflect its national circulation and scope. He later sold it to the Oneida Nation of New York which turned it into a magazine and an online publication before it decided to discontinue it as a for-profit venture. The tribe gifted it to the National Congress of American Indians in Washington DC and in 2018 made the smart move of hiring Mark who convinced NCAI to turn ICT into a non-profit news site. Mark and I met in 1981 which was coincidentally the same year that ICT got its start. We were introduced by one of my uncles the late Reuben Snake Jr. who was a long time chairman of the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska and a national leader in Native American rights. In my Ho-Chunk language the word for uncle the one on your mother's side of the family is Dega. He was my Dega Reuben and one of my mentors and role models. He said to me about Mark you need to meet this young man he's really sharp and he's going places and my Dega was right. Before Mark turned ICT into a non-profit he worked in the journalism field for many years. He started at his tribe's newspaper on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho and went on to report and edit for newspapers across the country. He's been a college journalism professor and once started his own newspaper on the Navajo Reservation. So when Mark asked me if I wanted to work with him and run the business side of ICT and that I could work remotely from Wisconsin I said yes. After years of working in the news industry for commercial companies and now to work with other Indigenous people in the name of journalism it felt like coming home. I'm now the president and CEO of the Indige Public Media the non-profit organization that owns ICT. We cover the Indigenous world through a daily digital platform and a weekday newscast with international viewership. Our work matters because we tell stories rarely covered by mainstream media and our stories are written and produced by Indigenous journalists. About a year and a half ago the American Journalism Project approached us about applying for a grant. They said dream big with us. If you had the resources what would you do? Mark and I replied that we would want to expand our reach by starting more news bureaus in areas that have high concentrations of Indigenous people. Last year the American Journalism Project awarded us a $1.3 million grant to do just that. That was followed by a $1.2 million grant from the Yellow Chair Foundation and then other grantors such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation followed suit. Those grants will allow us to expand from two news bureaus to nine in the next two to three years. We also just had a record-setting year in revenue raised from digital and classified ads and e-marketing. We set a stretch goal of $700,000 for digital revenue and we blew past that and ended with $790,000 in 2022. We also raised more than $300,000 in individual contributions which is awesome when you think our average donation is about $35. This all helps us keep our content free and that is really important to us. We're building a different kind of news organization, one built on Indigenous values. In a visioning session held last year our executive team and board members identified seven values that we incorporate into our workplace culture. Those values are respect, humility, integrity, wisdom, compassion, courage and truth. These and other values not mentioned here are part of the teachings that have been handed down to us through the generations. I think of my parents and my grandparents and what they wanted for my siblings and me. I think of the family history and stories that they told to me and my sisters, Janice and Marianne who are here tonight and my other siblings, Helene, LeVon, Jeffrey who are with our ancestors in the spirit world. I think of what my parents and grandparents shared with us about our great grandparents and who they were and how they lived their lives. And by the way I have family members and extended family members here tonight and I'm so happy they're here from the Thunder Cloud singers to the Sanford White Eagle, Legion Post and other family members. My relatives are always there to encourage me and to lift me up. So I want to say thank you to each one of them for making the trip to Milwaukee. They know the values that I'm talking about. I feel truly blessed to embrace those values that our ancestors wanted to instill in us and I'm blessed to be able to use those values as a foundation for both my personal and professional life. When I think of those values in terms of my education at Marquette, courage is the one that stands out. It takes courage to ask tough questions of politicians, business leaders, community leaders and then bright stories that speak truth to power. It takes courage to sometimes be the only person of color in your department or your workplace. It takes courage to dream big and then act on it. I'm so glad that at the core of this mission-driven purpose, Marquette University spurs on its community to have the courage to go out and set the world on fire. This honorary doctorate degree of Humane Letters is truly unexpected. Like that lightning bolt that came so close to me, I will look at it. It will inspire me and hopefully give me the courage to act on the next dream. Thanks so much to Marquette University for this esteemed honor and for continuing to open up the world to students of all ages through the power of education. Thank you. Journalism and opportunities to, I guess, educate my people and that the coverage also think about communities of color. So I think I try to sometimes lead by example and point out different stories that could be done but, you know, overall it was very evident to me that there needed to be more people like me in the newsroom in terms of diversifying the staff. So during all your years of covering all these different stories that you did, is there any one or maybe one that stands out and really made a significant impact on how you approach what you do or just life in general? Yeah, thank you. There are a lot of different stories that I really enjoy doing but I guess a group of stories in particular was when I was with the Dallas Morning News and I was able to write some stories about the amendments to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. So in that I got to write some stories about not only the Native American Church but prisoners rights and then the use of eagle feathers and looking at sacred sites and the protection of them. So those I felt, you know, were really important stories to tell and I enjoyed doing those. Congratulations Dr. Mitchell. I've read the Black Panther Party newsletter and newspaper was widely circulated at times within the American Indian movement and I'm wondering if there's ways how you see the news and newspapers as ways not just to create awareness of social issues but also to build solidarity across various social movements. You mean in terms of journalism? I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch the question. Sorry, what do you see as the power of news and newspapers to build solidarity across social movements and organizations in addition to the just and beyond just building awareness of the issues themselves? Yeah, so I think that can be an outcome of it to build solidarity but at the core of it is finding the truth and talking about or uncovering the truth or trying to find the truth and be accurate about it and sometimes that creates discourse and a lot of things on social media and I would think that's more of an outgrowth of it as opposed to going into doing something and wanting to have that kind of solidarity. I mean it's great when that happens but I think at the core of it it's the way about being accurate and uncovering the truth. Dr. Michelle? Yes. My children and I live in a all close together and my kids all go to, grandkids all go to one district in this state and I was feeling kind of embarrassed that recently there was something that happened in the school district where there was actually out and out racism that was kind of impounded on some young person and so I felt like we were way ahead of that but I know if it was just because I'm fortunate enough to be more forward-thinking than that so what would you advise? I know my kids are the children of my grandchildren are wanting to do something about that issue what would you advise them to do? Yeah I had heard about that I hadn't seen anything written about it but yeah that's really unfortunate and I guess it's unfortunate that it's happening you know so so close to home but in terms of you know my background as a journalist it's good to get the word out about it and you know publicize it so that you can shine a light on that type of you know actions that are happening also through your local newspaper you can write letters to the editor or ask that you know there'd be coverage about it or you know editorials so that you know the the larger community can can know about it and and do something about it. Dr. Michelle you are also very instrumental in working toward press freedom in the native press itself and sometimes you took some blows because of it can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah that was quite some time ago I think you're referring to when I was with the lacrosse tribune and there was a controversy over a casino gaming supplier yeah um yeah that was a difficult time and I was speaking to a class this morning on campus and that sort of a question like that came up but um yeah it was difficult at that time and then I relayed a story that one of my relatives had said to me because of the the controversy that sort of had a bad light that showed the Ho Chiang nation in a bad light that I should choose whether to be a Ho Chiang person or a journalist and so my response was I am Ho Chiang there's you know that's who I am and I choose to be a journalist and that sometimes you know when we ask the tough questions that's part of the job but the job is really to get at the truth and so I had to be focused on that and hope that hope that they understood. I think we have time for one more question. Congratulations amazing stuff my question is about from your perspective in the job that you have and it's two supreme court cases affirmative action affecting colleges admissions and Brackin versus Holland there seems to be some coalition around laws and how that's going to affect Indian country come spring and summer far-reaching effects and I'm wondering if you're seeing any kind of intellectual or professional coming together of thought of what's going to happen and what we can be doing to prepare for what will happen and thank you for that well ICT has covered that story so if you read our coverage you know we look at you know all angles of that and I I can't really say what what might happen or what we should be doing but definitely this is something that the larger media should be looking at and and covering as well and I would say to even look at our coverage and how we're approaching that but I'm now on the business side of the of the company and so I think that's a good question for for mark and the editorial side of our company okay that's going to conclude our Q&A for today thank you for all of the great questions thank you Karen Lincoln Michelle for your inspiring words tonight this concludes our special program and we invite all of you to remain for the reception in honor of Karen Lincoln Michelle in the Lynch Lounge thank you for being with us tonight and please stand for our flag bearers we're going to retire the colors which will be followed by the recessional we'll ask that you remain in your seats until the stage party has departed thank you