2018 Fall Semester Theme: Indigeneity in the Americas

This semester’s theme will explore the meaning and importance of Indigeneity in the Americas in relation to both reservation and urban Native communities and their neighboring non-Native communities. More specifically, we will explore the ways that power and privilege in the dominant society has related to Native and Indigenous subjectivities, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexualities, and class.  For example, to what extent do historical policies imposed by nation-state governments – like blood quantum – disproportionately discriminate against or disadvantage Indigenous peoples of multiracial ancestry, Indigenous women, and Indigenous peoples of the third and fourth genders?

We will also address how Indigenous scholarship continues to chart new frameworks for analyzing Indigenous cultural production, Indigenous activism, and Indigenous innovation across disciplines, genres, and regions.  How do Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, for instance, come to know and relate to terms like subjectivity, agency, power, privilege, race, gender, or settler colonialism?  How do these terms, in turn, shape Indigeneity in the Americas?  Finally, we will address the question of Indigeneity in the Americas in order to ascertain how bridging Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge is already and will continue to contribute to the critical study of a host of economic, political, social, and cultural issues—from climate change to violence against women to the inequality of resources– being faced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike.

 

Programs Related to the Theme

Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
Honoring Indigeneity: Indigenous Knowledge(s) and Indigenous Sovereignty
Dan Longboat – Roronhiakewen (He Clears the Sky), Trent University

 

Monday, October 1, 2018
Althouse Hall, Room 106, 6:30 p.m.
A Day in the Life of a Sixteenth-Century Ani-Yunwiya (Cherokee) Village
Kathryn Sampeck, Illinois State University
(Event sponsored by the Department of Anthropology & Archaeology and the Archaeological Institute of America)

 

Thursday, October 4, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
Boarding School Stories as Historic Sites of Memory
Tsianina Lomawaima, Arizona State University
(Event part of Carlisle Journeys Conference)

 

Thursday, October 4 – Sunday, October 7, 2018
Various Locations
Carlisle Journeys: Places of Memory and the Unfolding Stories of the Carlisle Indian School
(Event is being hosted by Dickinson College & the Cumberland County Historical Society.
Registration required at: https://journeys.historicalsociety.com/registration/ or call 717-249-7610.)

 

Thursday, November 1, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
How the Wild West was Spun
Dovie Thomason
, storyteller & activist

 

Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.
The Paradox of Productivity: Lessons from an Indigenous Agriculture
Jane Mt. Pleasant, Cornell University

 

 TROUT GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

For information on submitting proposals for future themes /faculty seminars, click here.