Patty Loew

Patty Loew is a professor at Medill and director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Loew is a former broadcast journalist in public and commercial television.

She is the author of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, now in its second edition, which won the Wisconsin Library Association's 2002 Outstanding Book Award; Native People of Wisconsin, also newly revised and expanded, which is used by 20,000 Wisconsin school children as a social studies text; and Teachers Guide to Native People of Wisconsin. Her latest book, Seventh Generation Earth Ethics, won the 2014 Midwest Book Award for Culture.

Loew has produced many documentaries for public and commercial television, including the award-winning Way of the Warrior, which aired nationally on PBS in 2007 and 2011. For 20 years, she hosted news and public affairs programs, including WeekEnd and In Wisconsin, for Wisconsin Public Television.

Loew, a 2019 inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of Wisconsin’s 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. Heritage Award, has written extensively about Ojibwe treaty rights, sovereignty and the role of Native media in communicating indigenous world views. Her documentaries have explored cultural expression through sports like baseball (Tinkers to Evers to Chief) and lacrosse (Sacred Stick) as well as contemporary resistance to environmental threats (Protect Our Future).

She works extensively with Native youth, teaching digital storytelling skills as a way to grow the next generation of Native storytellers and land stewards. She is a former member of the national board of directors for both UNITY: Journalists of Color and the Native American Journalists Association.

Prior to her position at Northwestern, Loew was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Professor Emerita, UW-Extension, and is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Civil Society and Community Studies in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology. In 2011 Dr. Loew received the Distinguished Alumni Award from UW-La Crosse and in 2010, Outstanding Woman of Color awards from both UW-Madison and the University of Wisconsin system.