After a personal discovery, Kate Nelson shifted her work to focus on Indigenous stories.
Kate Nelson (B.A. ’07) is a woman who has always projected competence and polish: A longtime Twin Cities media fixture, she’s respected, intelligent, stylish, a leader. But like most stories, there’s the part the world sees, and then the other part, which is always full of more complexities.
Since graduation, Nelson has worked in and around media, with a detour into a self-described dream job as an executive director for the nonprofit This Old Horse (she’s a devoted equestrian), eventually working her way into the Editor-in-Chief role at Artful Living, an oversized glossy, largely focused on lifestyle topics: homes, retail, and arts and culture.
By many journalists’ definition, she had Made It, winning prestigious awards and looking good doing it. Then in 2012, Nelson went through a personal upheaval: She discovered that the father she had known as her own was not her biological father—through an email from her mother, from whom she’d been estranged.
That news revealed far more than just her biological father’s name: It revealed that she was Tlingit (Alaska Native). “While this sudden disclosure validated my lifelong feelings of otherness—having grown up in rural northern Minnesota as an olive-skinned, dark-eyed, chubby-cheeked kid attempting to blend into an ocean of blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmates—it also completely shattered my precarious sense of self,” she wrote in a 2023 piece for The Guardian about salmon fishing in Alaska and exploring her newly discovered identity. In the end, she concluded: “I navigate a new existence as the person I have always been: a strong Tlingit woman who comes from a long line of strong Tlingit women.”
But it has been a years-long evolution, and it affected her relationship to her high-profile job. “After I got over the anxiety and excitement of having my story out in the world, it proved to me I was ready as I was ever going to be to fully dedicate myself to Indigenous content.”
What followed was a whirlwind—she thought she’d have downtime to consider her next steps, but inbound requests for more Indigenous-focused freelance stories and full-time work poured in even as she kept her editorship going at Artful Living. It was a pace that she finally realized last year she could not sustain.
“I had to really establish for myself the hierarchy of the type of content I want to be creating,” she said. “For me, the highest use of my skills is covering Indigenous topics. From there, it’s amplifying marginalized voices or groups, especially in the Twin Cities, which has a rich multicultural community.”
She isn’t leaving behind all the things she loved about Artful Living, where she’s still an editor at large: She still loves covering lifestyle topics, such as her features on Sean Sherman, the James Beard Award-winning Indigenous head chef at Minneapolis restaurant Owamni. And she’s learning to take care of herself while still sitting with and writing about the often traumatic, devastating things that have happened, and continue to happen, to Indigenous people.
She notes her experience talking to Sterlin Harjo of Reservation Dogs, a smash TV show about Indigenous people as “a prime example” of the complexity of Indigenous life. “There is trauma and heartbreak, but also joy and humor, and nothing’s one-dimensional,” she said. “I’ve learned so much from a lot of these people who I have profiled or spoken with, not just about their lives and Indigenous history, but also about how you tell these stories in a way that’s meaningful, and how you can find the joy and still take care of yourself.”
Her new work focus feeds her “ever-evolving worldview” and vice versa, and lends a deeper meaning, too—not just to her Native American audience, but also other demographics, who may need exposure to or education on these issues. Her senior thesis at the j-school focused on the idea of whether journalistic objectivity really exists, or is a reasonable expectation for human beings.
“Can I be 100 percent objective? No. Does that mean for some reason the content I’m creating is less legitimate? Also no,” she said. “But for so long, the ongoing effects of colonialism have been poorly communicated, misunderstood, ignored, and hidden. If I can bring light to some of those issues for people who might want to know about it, but are unsure how to learn, then to me, I’m doing my job. It’s about how we educate more people and hopefully, they feel compelled to do something about it.”
Written by Katie Dohman
