Rate My Professor Linda Clemmons

Clemmons has published three books drawing on primary sources such as handwritten letters and court records from the Minnesota Historical Society. Her first monograph, Conflicted Mission: Faith, Disputes, and Deception on the Dakota Frontier (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014), explores conflicts and deceptions in early missionary work with the Dakota. Dakota in Exile: The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War (University of Iowa Press, 2019) details how Dakota people endured imprisonment and exile following the war. Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville and the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876 (South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2023) recounts the life of Angelique Renville, a mixed-ancestry Dakota woman adopted by missionaries Stephen and Mary Riggs, subjected to forced English education, seminary training in Ohio, and unpaid servitude, who later renounced them, reclaimed her Dakota identity, lived in Dakota Territory, and sued unsuccessfully to recover sold land. This book was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Western Biography in 2024. Clemmons has presented her findings at the Department of History Faculty Research Seminar on Native American prisoners of war in 2017 and at the Iowa Historical Society's History Camp on Dakota prisoners' literacy uses.