By Margot Higgins
This is the fourth in a series, “History En Vêlo,” about cycling and thinking historically, shared with NiCHE.
In an empty parking lot with patches of silty snow and grey ice, Kaisy wobbled, skidded a bit, and struggled to maintain her balance. She had barely bicycled previously and hailed from Brownsville, Texas, and yet she had signed up for my winter bicycling class. As an informal pre-requisite to that class, students agreed to spend the winter semester pedaling for their education around the Twin Cities; she was well aware of this. Home to the International Winter Bicycling Summit that year, Minneapolis is well known for a vibrant winter bicycling culture. I wanted to offer my students a different take on what is widely perceived as a lethal activity, and to learn about the politics of bicycle mobility in the area. We were admittedly off to a bumpy beginning.
Kaisy had e-mailed me to ask for some “tips on how to stop and start.” Adhering to my promise that I had designed the course “for all bicycle abilities,” we met for a practice ride in the lot behind our classroom as the late January sun set.
Bam! Within less than 30 seconds, Kaisy collided into my bicycle, dented and bent the fender – years later, I still haven’t been able to straighten it out entirely. Nevertheless, she saved herself from toppling over, and me from doing the same. Failing at lesson number one, I gulped and thought to myself, maybe I should start requiring students to sign a waiver? But when Kaisy also mentioned that she had recently started playing ice hockey, I knew this young woman from southern Texas was determined. She was not the only student with little previous experience.
By semester’s end, Kaisy bicycled smoothly and confidently throughout the Twin Cities – she never had another crash. Empowering my students to be comfortable in a variety of bicycling conditions is just one of the small things that I love about the bicycle curriculum I teach. Entitled “Bicycling the Urban Landscape: A History and Politics of Bicycling,” designing the Twin Cities-based course had also introduced me to the array of bicycle players in my new community. Continue reading
In 1994, 
Like Heidi Bohaker’s work on Anishinaabeg doodem, we wondered how White’s assumption of a cohesive or collective identity among Algonquian-speaking peoples distorted his findings, and about how the book’s emphasis on French-Indigenous relations disproportionately emphasized French authority in a landscape where they occupied a relatively minor “space of power” (to use Elizabeth Mancke’s framework) in a region that included numerous complex Indigenous polities.