SUNY Oneonta welcomed award-winning author Toni Jensen to campus on Monday, Oct. 6, to discuss the themes central to her book, “Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land,” which is a New York Times “Editors' Choice” pick and the university’s 2025 Common Read selection.
Jensen met with students, faculty and staff throughout the day and closed her visit by delivering the 2025 Mills Distinguished Lecture to nearly 500 people gathered inside the Hunt Union Ballroom on Monday night.
Now in its twelfth year of advancing diversity by encouraging students to examine and better understand topics such as equity, inclusion and personal history through many lenses, the Common Read aims to further infuse cultural literacy into SUNY Oneonta’s academic program by asking the campus community to read a diversity-related book, which is then discussed in fall courses across several disciplines.
Against a colorful backdrop featuring the covers of previous Common Read books, Jensen said she was honored that the Common Read committee chose “Carry,” a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land and Indigenous women’s lives, this year. As an associate professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of Arkansas, Jensen said she deeply understands and appreciates the work that goes into these kinds of events and initiatives.
After introductions, Jensen read a two-part essay reflecting on her family’s background and history in Alberta and, later, Iowa; guns and gun violence across the country; gentrification and colonization; and the overlap among these themes. She described her family’s traditions of “talking story” versus “talking crazy” and spoke about what it means to her to be Métis, a person of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, particularly those from the areas surrounding the Red and Saskatchewan rivers.
In the late 1800s, Jensen’s family—like so many others—lost the farm they had lived on for generations when the federal government sold 150,000 acres to the Saskatchewan Land and Homestead Company. Stripped of their livelihood, they were forced to leave. Armed men arrived to seize the land and its profits, leaving behind some of Jensen’s earliest family stories of violence.
Today, these varied stories of violence continue on in our “everyday American problem with guns and commerce and gun violence,” along with rural gentrification and colonization, Jensen said. She told audience members that the way forward includes thinking of their lives “in a way that connects you to other people outside the utility of commerce or labor.”
“These are not easy questions to pose, and there are not easy answers to these questions, but there are answers,” Jensen said. “In my lifetime I have never known such a nationwide feeling of collective silence as we have in our country right now. We have to talk about it to get to the answers about gun violence and every kind of violence. ... No one is coming to do this talking for us.”
About the Mills Distinguished Lecture
The Mills Distinguished Lectureship is named to honor the memory of Professor Albert Mills and his wife, Helena. Their bequest to the College at Oneonta Foundation led to the establishment in 1988 of a fund to bring prominent speakers to our campus.