Biography

Marion Helland was born in 1927 in Blue Earth, Minnesota, to Olaf and Margit Helland. She earned an associate’s degree from Waldorf College in 1946 and a bachelor’s in science with a major in elementary education from the University of Minnesota in 1953 . Soon after, she began teaching, first in Bode, Iowa, then in Davenport, Iowa, and finally in the Robbinsdale School District in Minnesota, where she retired in 1992.

Outside of teaching, Helland was heavily involved in the civil rights movement. In 1965, Helland responded to an ad in an American Federation of Teachers newsletter, and that summer, she became a volunteer with the Freedom School in Gadsden, Alabama. In subsequent years, she returned to the South to register voters, helped create a library for Black students in Jackson, Mississippi, and in 1968 traveled with the Minnesota delegation to Resurrection City in Washington, D.C as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. During this period, Helland noticed that textbooks had incomplete information about the civil rights movement, and began to compile resources. She continued her work on anti-racist pedagogy in Minnesota, where she helped to draft a public school curriculum on Native American history, served as a design advisor for Hands Across Campus, and created the organization Reducing and Eliminating Hate Behavior (REHaB), which convened dialogues with people involved in hate incidents. She also continued to organize with the American Indian Movement and the Minnesota Human Rights Commission.

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