THE CHANGING FACE OF MISS MINNESOTA

A few weeks after becoming the first Native American to win the Miss Minnesota pageant, Rachel Evangelisto cheerfully sits for an interview at the community room of her apartment building in downtown Minneapolis.

She acts and looks the part of a pageant winner: warm, witty, and engaging, with eye-catching earrings of her creation and an irrepressible smile. Then, over the course of an hour, Evangelisto (to paraphrase her own words) tells who she is: an aspiring lawyer and judge dedicated to maintaining and improving Indian child welfare, and to driving diversity in this state and beyond.

Her deeply held convictions are the backbone of her current profession, and they guide her efforts as an ambassador in the state over the coming year.

Evangelisto was born in Aberdeen, S.D., went to high school near Rapid City, and is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She recalls visiting the University of Minnesota Twin Cities with her aunt and falling in love with the campus, but ultimately the tuition waiver for Native American students swayed her to the U of M Morris.

“I really appreciated the community that Morris had, both in the town and also on the campus,” she says. “I think 10 percent of the population is Indigenous students, and so to be surrounded in a way that I’ve never been surrounded before by Indigenous youth and professors and colleagues was incredibly eye opening.”

She earned her degree in political science—with an emphasis in law—and law will be her primary focus soon. She was recently accepted at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, but because of her Miss Minnesota duties will delay her start there till next fall.

“I’ve known since the sixth grade that I wanted to go to law school. I just didn’t know for what,” Evangelisto says. “I think that stemmed from a lot of people telling me who I could be and couldn’t be. And I was finally like, ‘You know what, I’m going to tell you who I am. I’m not going to let you define who I am.’ Getting into law school at the same time as winning Miss Minnesota—it was the two biggest dreams of my life coming true at once.”