Thomas Davis Releases New Book

Thirty years ago, tribal college educator and poet Thomas Davis of Sturgeon Bay began writing poems about the tribal college movement. He started with the College of Menominee Nation, which he helped to found in northern Wisconsin. 

Davis had no intention of developing a book out of the poems – mostly free-verse poetry that chronicled the events and people who were building a new kind of educational system that would preserve and evolve Indigenous language, history and culture. Davis gave these poems away, and many were lost –  until now.

Meditation on the Ceremonies of Beginnings is a new kind of narrative poetry and an informal history of the tribal college movement and the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium. Told through poetic verse, it captures the dreams and vision of Indigenous leaders in higher education.