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On Friday morning, during an all-school assembly at Austin High School, Associate Justice Anne McKeig, told her story in a talk titled “Just a Girl from Federal Dam- Pathway to Leadership.”  

From her first word, she had the audience’s full attention. 

McKeig strode around the stage as she told students about her educational journey. Growing up a proud descendant of the White Earth Nation, in Federal Dam, Minnesota, population 123, she found it very hard to adjust to the big city when she went to college at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. She just wanted to go back to the familiar.  

McKeig emphasized that whenever she went into a new part of her life, she felt very uncomfortable, and had to keep her goal of being a lawyer in mind.  

“I was not a top student in high school, college or law school, but I knew how to work hard and I had a goal,” she said.  

McKeig also worked to find friends and mentors to help her feel more comfortable and to help with problems as she encountered them. Not well off, in addition to her intense classwork, she had to work various jobs to support herself.  

After passing the bar exam, she found that she loved working in the court system, advocating in family court situations and always wanting the best outcome for the children involved.

As her career progressed, McKeig developed her skills and was approached about judgeship. She credits her move to becoming a judge and then getting on the supreme court to the mentoring of Judge Robert Blaeser, the first Native American judge in Minnesota.   

The first big lesson he taught her was that to be a judge, she would have to give up her habit of “eye rolling.” 

 “How many of you are eye rollers?” she asked the student audience. “A judge cannot show that sort of emotion.” 

Judge Blaeser was determined to get a Native American on the Minnesota Supreme Court and didn’t give up until he convinced McKeig that she could do it and convinced her to apply.  When she was appointed, she experienced that old discomfort of thinking she didn’t belong there, just like in college. But McKeig had made big transitions before, and after learning more about her new position as she worked at it, she found this new challenge to be satisfying.

She stated that one of her favorite parts of her job on the supreme court is the opportunity to be in contact with young people in settings like the assembly, helping them learn that just because they haven’t done something before doesn’t mean they can’t do it now. 

After her presentation, Justice McKeig took questions and continued to connect with the audience with her acceptance of any question, from her shoe size to her salary, to her funniest case and her hardest case.

This presentation was brought to AHS by the Austin Branch of American Association of University Women. It was rescheduled to this week from last March during Women’s History Month, when the program had to be canceled due to snow.