Ezechiel Brummels

Additional graduate credit hours earned at Wayne State College in English.

My name is Zeke Brummels and I will be teaching World History, Geography, and Speech at the Nebraska Indian Community College. I was raised in Northeast Nebraska by an English professor with a strong interest in Native American history and literature. Texts like Black Elk Speaks and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee were offered to me just as about as soon as I could comprehend their subject material. I carried this passion into college at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where I majored in English with a Writing Emphasis and minored in History. Most of my undergraduate history classes specialized in American West or Native Americans.

I took some time between undergraduate and graduate school to pursue screenwriting and filmmaking, but ultimately returned to Kearney as a Graduate Assistant in the History department. My graduate studies took on an international tint, and I immersed myself in Latin America. During this program, I traveled across South America from coast to coast and back again. This trip profoundly changed how I looked at the world. I was used to thinking of indigenous cultures only through the lens of the Native experience here at home on the Plains. But to see such a diversity of peoples on another continent with a very different and yet very shared story to the native peoples of this country left me in for lack of a better word—awe.

After graduate school, I met my wife Molly, who I moved to Ecuador with for six months. It was there that I fell in love with backpacking and seeing the world under the power of my own two feet. I intend to bring this into the classroom and share with students the potential and power of an international worldview.