User:Bobamnertiopsis/RogerB

Roger Buffalohead

Early life

Roger Buffalohead was born close to White Eagle, Oklahoma, on May 30, 1939, the ninth child of ten. Buffalohead, whose Ponca name was Insta dupa, was an enrolled member of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma. He studied at Oklahoma State University, the first among his siblings to attend college, and later attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he met his wife Priscilla. The pair were introduced by Priscilla's brother and later discovered that they lived next door to one another. They married in 1965 while studying for their PhDs and had a son, Eric, that same year. Before finishing their degrees, the Buffaloheads moved to work at the University of Cincinnati, then the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Career

While at UCLA, Buffalohead was approached by the University of Minnesota (U of M) in Minneapolis. The U of M first invited Buffalohead to teach at their new Department of American Indian Studies (the country's first such department) and later asked him if he would serve as its chair. He accepted and in 1970, the Buffaloheads moved to Minneapolis where their daughter Julie was born. At the U of M, Buffalohead developed Ojibwe and Dakota language courses, which were some of the first for those languages to be accredited in the United States.

In the mid-1970s, Buffalohead taught at Washington State University for one year, then took up teaching at the U of M's Duluth campus. Sometime later, he took work at New Mexico's Institute of American Indian Arts, whose art school he helped establish.