Robert Littlefield, NDSU professor of communication; Jennifer Reierson, assistant professor of communication at College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minn.; Kimberly Cowden, assistant professor of communication at the University of North Dakota; Shelly Stowman, doctoral student at NDSU; and Cheryl Long Feather from United Tribes Community College in Bismarck, N.D., published an article in the September 2009 issue of Communication, Culture and Critique, a journal of the International Communication Association.

Titled “A Case Study of the Red Lake, Minnesota, School Shooting: Intercultural Learning in the Renewal Process,” the authors suggest that as organizations and communities recover from a crisis, they balance and accommodate competing value systems, complicating the process of healing and renewal. Using the Red Lake, Minn. public school shootings in 2005 as a focus for the study, 246 media articles revealed the role of cultural variables in the renewal process.

While an outsider’s assessment of the community response to the tragedy provided evidence of renewal, particularly related to the reopening of the high school, an insider’s examination of local perspectives revealed underlying cultural tensions stemming from pre-existing conditions between the dominant white and native cultures that demonstrated the complexity of the renewal process.