Karen Diver: Protector of Indigenous Scholarship

In June 2024, the University of Minnesota established research guidelines surrounding the responsible, ethical utilization of Indigenous scholarship. Passing through the faculty senate with a 96 percent vote, this policy guides research to respect tribal data sovereignty and prevent the unethical extraction of information.

The policy’s successful passage was the result of dedicated work by Karen Diver, who currently serves as senior advisor to the university’s president for Native American affairs. Her role involves working with senior leaders on tribal initiatives, informed by tribal priorities and including reparative work.

She says of the successful faculty senate vote that it was “bigger than just approval of the policy. To me, it was [an indication that our stated] University of Minnesota values are actually a lived reality and that people are willing to put those values into action.”

Diver also has enacted support initiatives for Indigenous citizens of any of the eleven Minnesota Tribes. A tuition and fee waiver has pivoted toward housing support and housing scholarships for incoming freshmen to meet needs for Native students in the American Indian Scholars Program.

Diver is leading the repatriation of the Mimbres collection, which includes more than 150 ancestral remains and thousands of cultural belongings from gravesites in northeastern Arizona. This effort started in 2022, with Diver and the university’s Board of Regents working with the Hopi tribe in Arizona to coordinate the return of these remains and items in partnership with the Weismann Art Museum.

She is excited about the university’s upcoming talks about One Health Minnesota — proactively examining health workforce development, especially in rural areas. “Adding that rural Indigenous piece to the big health initiative really just has me curious and excited, because it can have generational impact,” says Diver.

Finding Control Over Her Own Life

Diver began her career in the nonprofit sector, which included running the YWCA group in Duluth for 12 years. She put herself through higher education as a young single mother. “I knew without college that my options for employment would always leave me vulnerable, so my goal was: get stable before my daughter knew she was poor.”

She pursued college in Minnesota because she was from a Minnesota-based tribe, making tribal scholarship money accessible. However, it was not easy. She had to overcome hurdles to receive this necessary aid.

“Our systems are often about control rather than empowerment,” Diver says. She shares that after she got on welfare, a caseworker told her, “I won’t approve your plans for school.”

Diver replied that not having school as an option was not going to fix her situation. “You watch generations in your family struggle with the same things; that was my life.” She knew the pathway to agency in the workplace would require higher education.

“As an Indigenous person, I benefited from the choices my parents made to make it a little better for me. And so that becomes my obligation, right? How do I make it a little better for the ones after me? One less burden, one less policy they have to overcome.”

Her work with YWCA in Duluth was both groundbreaking and rewarding, but she stressed it also had the “burden of representation. I was the Indian lady,” Diver says: “‘Can you be on our board? Can you do this? Can you do that?’”

In contrast, throughout her three-time elected position leading the Fond du Lac Band tribe of Lake Superior Chippewa, she was simply Karen again — someone capable with the connections to resources the tribe needed at the time, not a tokenized Indigenous woman.

As Diver has gotten older and moved forward in her career, she’s focused on that sense of agency. “I actually have more control over it now. My purpose here is to fundamentally inform and change this institution. So, if what you’re looking for is to check the American Indian box on your hiring committee, sorry, that’s not the best use of my time. I can say things like, ‘No,’ and bring in other people.”

Her career also included serving on President Obama’s Domestic Policy Council from November 2015 until he left office in January 2017.

Above all, Diver’s personal choices have been geared toward equality of opportunity and helping people understand the implications of their actions; she wants all players in improved systems to work for people who need opportunities the most. “To me,” says Diver, “the sign of a well-functioning system is that people can do what they need to do and have what they need without barriers.”

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Find an interview on Native Lights about Karen Diver shared by our collaborative media partner AMPERS radio network, which was a basis for this story: minnesotanativenews.org/karen-diver-championing-indigenous-excellence