Racism is still quite a problem in rural areas, but in urban areas it has been reduced quite a bit over the last 35 years. There is still a very long way to go, my wife still gets dirty looks and stares occasionally.

It is interesting that the University is named after a Native American chief AND a geographic location…. your wikipedia entry makes it a bit confusing. I’d like to get the history straight on this.

Chief Bemidji seems to have been a name given later in life to a man who already had a name (Shay-now-ish-kung) who eventually settled on Bemidji Lake, but at a time when the lake was not named. “Bemidji” as an Ojibway term seems to have been applied to the set of lakes (Irving and Bemidji today) and the river crossing through them, because that is essentially what it means.

In other words, and I may have that wrong, Sha-now-ish-kung was linked with the term Bemidji as “The go to guy to get to the place where the river traverses the lake up near that other lake” and later he moved to the ‘other’ lake (which was also where the water traversed the lake” and the lake and he became known as Bemidji” … he was not so much an official chief as a headman.

The French called this lake “Lac Traverse, but it was later renamed by the non-French whites “St. Ann’s”

Its name derives from the Ojibwe Bay-may-ji-ga-maug (Double-Vowel orthography: bemijigamaag), [5] meaning “lake that traverses another body of water”. On occasion,inOjibwe,the cityofBemidji is called Wabigamaang (“at the lake channel/narrows”), because part of the city is situated on the Lakes Bemidji/Irving narrows, located on the south end of Lake Bemidji, and extends to the eastern shore of Lake Irving. Some people also credit the name to Chief Bemidji, a Ojibwe chief.

Yes, 1862. Thanks.