01 ABOUT ME
Cape Town, 2024
Megan O. Manion is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the Univesity of Minnesota. Her subfields are International Relations and Comparative Politics.
I have an M.Sc. from SOAS in Conflict, Rights and Justice, as well as a B.A. in Politics and History from Willamette University. At UMN, I hold fellowships at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the Law School’s Human Rights Center. I am currently working on my dissertation, which explores the politics of responsibility for genocide through a comparative political ethnography of texts documented and archived by U.N. tribunals and international people’s tribunals.
I currently live among the Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the homelands of the Dakhóta Oyáte, where the University of Minnesota exploits the legal privileges of the ‘land-grant’ scheme to enable a collective benefit from ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. I was raised in the ancestral lands of the Columbia River Tribes—Chinookan, Tenino, Tygh, Wyam, Sahaptin, Wascoes—the Warm Springs, and the Paiutes. I include this information here because my presence in these places, and my education and scholarship, would be impossible without the destructive history of removal, starvation, genocide, and erasure of this land’s original and rightful caretakers. I believe that the possibility of our collective future depends on sharing in the work necessary for repairing this ongoing perpetual harm.
Am I on Indigenous land?