MIGRATION

The canonical story of the United States’ founding makes religious freedom a central motive for colonists’ migration to North America.  While historians dispute the accuracy of this assumption, it is true that newcomers to this nation have brought their religions with them, that their religions are shaped by being transported to this context, and that the import of various religions by newcomers reshapes American religion.  These themes play out in variations in every generation, including in the lives of St. Olaf’s founders.  This series of events explores recent instances of these dynamics by asking two deceptively simple questions:  How does their movement to the United States change the religion of recent immigrants?  How does the recent movement in the United States of adherents of various religions change American perceptions and experiences of religious freedom?

A Mighty Fortress, Far from Lake Wobegone
Photographs by award-winning Wing Young Huie highlight immigrant Lutheran congregations in the Twin Cities. The display includes related publications and documents. 

"Wing Young Huie is an award-winning photographer who has received international attention for his many projects that document the changing cultural landscape of his home state Minnesota. His best-known work is Lake Street USA, which in the summer and fall of 2000 transformed six miles of a well-known Minneapolis thoroughfare into one of the most remarkable public art projects in recent memory.

One of Wing's recent projects, 9 Months in America: An Ethnocentric Tour, presents a post 9/11 America; a place where Asians, particularly Chinese, happen to be in the majority. This ambitious, cross-country odyssey frames the complexity, nuance, appropriation, humor, contradictions, and surprises of American life in our time."

November 12
Buntrock Commons
Ballroom
11:30 a.m.

R. Stephen Warner and representatives of metro area religious communities explore ways that recent immigrants are changing the landscape of American religion and the experience of migration and American religious freedom are changing the religious life of their communities.

R. Stephen Warner, author of A Church of Our Own: Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion and co-editor of Gatherings In Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration

K.S.P. Kumar, Hindu Temple of Minnesota

Hassan Mohamud, chair and director of the Dawah Institute of Minnesota

Luisa Cabello Hansel, Minneapolis Area Synod Hispanic Ministry

February 26
Buntrock Commons
Ballroom
3:30 p.m.

Reading and Booksigning

Kao Kalia Yang, author of the memoir The Late Homecomer, chronicles her family’s escape from Laos to Thailand, nine years of living in a refugee camp, and the family’s emigration to the U.S. in 1987. One of the first nationally distributed Hmong-American memoirs, The Late Homecomer won 2 Minnesota Book Awards.

A 2003 Carleton College graduate, Kalia has an MFA from Columbia University (NY). In addition to The Late Homecomer, she wrote the film The Place Where We Were Born with filmmaker John O'Brien.

Scandanavian Concert

Featuring  Ameriikan Poijat (Boys of America) Brass Band , VästerÖsterbotten Brass Band (St. Olaf student brass ensemble), John Berquist- Nordic Immigrant Folklorist and Storyteller , and “the Finnish Tango Queens” Elina Rupert and Eeva Savolainen

This event is in celebration of the Ameriikan Poijat's twentieth season.