sign in sign up
<<
Home , American Indian Movement, Red Power movement

In the Wake of Red Power Movements

New Perspectives on Indigenous Intellectual and Narrative Traditions Online-Symposium at U Warwick, May 14/15, 2021, convened by Dr. Doro Wiese

Image credit: Alcatraz Indian Records, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Drawing by Alvin Willie, originally published in January 1970 This event is supported by Online conference (Zoom): In the Wake of Red Power Movements. New Perspectives on Indigenous Intellectual and Narrative Traditions Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, May 14/15, 2021 Convened by Dr. Doro Wiese, IAS, University of Warwick

Keynote speakers: Dr. Mishuana Goeman Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, UCLA Dr. Robert Warrior Distinguished Professor of American Literature & Culture, University of Kansas

This symposium explores North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions that were recovered, reclaimed, or (re-)invented in the wake of Red Power movements that emerged in the 1960s in the settler colonial societies of and the USA. It asks: which new perspectives and visions have been developed over the last 50 years within Indigenous studies and related fields when looking at Indigenous land and land rights, Indigenous political and social sovereignty, extractivism and environmental destruction, oppressive sex/gender systems, and for describing the repercussions of settler in North America, especially in narrative representations? The symposium is guided by the idea that North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions developed and recovered since the 1960s offer new and reclaimed ways of being, organizing, and thinking in the face of destruction, dispossession, and oppression; Indigenous ways of writing and righting are connected to ongoing social struggles for land rights, access to clean water, and intellectual and socio-political sovereignty; they are, as Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill (2013) have pointed out, “a gift” from which most academic disciplines can benefit greatly. In the face of ongoing exploitations of Indigenous knowledges and resources, it is paramount that researchers who focus on Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions, especially those who come from settler- colonial backgrounds, carefully examine their implications in settler-colonial ways of dispossession. It is in this context that the symposium encourages self-reflectivity and invites participants from all positionalities to include reflections on how to act, think, and write in a non-appropriative manner about the intellectual achievements of Indigenous academics, activists, artists from North America. What kind of challenges does an engagement with Indigenous intellectual and narrative achievements from North America pose, and how do these achievements enable their audience to think differently and to develop visions that go beyond settler colonial hegemonies that make themselves felt in customs, laws, property-relations, or gender roles?

Possible topics include: • North American Indigenous intellectual and narrative traditions that emerged or were rediscovered over the last 50 years; • Indigenous representations of land and water, community-building, the other-than-human world; • connections and frictions among and within different Indigenous traditions and/or settler societies in North America; • Indigenous understandings of sex/gender; • methodologies for reading across ethnic divides, alliance-building tools in academia and activism.

.

This event is supported by

Image credit: Alcatraz Indian Occupation Records, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Drawing by Alvin Willie, originally published in January 1970. Time schedule

Friday, May 14 4.30 to 5 pm CEST Gathering of and welcome to all participants (UTC+2) 5 pm to 6. 15 pm CEST Keynote Dr. Robert Warrior + Discussion 6.15 to 6.30 pm CEST - Break - 6.30 to 7.30 pm CEST Panel 1: Re-visioning the Red Power Movements Dr. Jennifer O’Neal, University of Oregon Dr. Matthias Voigt, Free University, Berlin Clementine Bordeaux, PhD candidate, UC Los Angeles 7.30 to 8 pm CEST - Break - 8 to 8.45 pm CEST Panel 2: Rewriting the Red Power Movements Dr. Gayatri Devi, Lock Haven University Dr. Doro Wiese, U of Warwick & Radboud U Nijmegen 8.45 to 9 pm CEST - Break - 9 to 10 pm CEST Public reading: Dr. , Lee Maracle, chair: Dr. Deanna Reder, Simon Fraser University 10 to 11 pm CEST Bring your own glass (or cup) and hang out in a break-out-room of your choice! We will have a red, blue, yellow and green one. Saturday, May 15 4.30 to 5 pm CEST Gathering of and welcome to all participants (UTC+2) 5 pm to 6. 15 pm CEST Keynote Dr. Mishuana Goeman + Discussion 6.15 to 6.30 pm CEST - Break - 6.30 to 7.30 pm CEST Panel 1: Recording/Performing Indigenous Sovereignty Melissa Schnarr, PhD candidate, Western University Justin Moir, Independent scholar Dr. Ulia Gosart, UCLA IS 7.30 to 8 pm CEST - Break - 8 to 9 pm CEST Panel 2: Place-Based-Knowledge and Environmental (Hi-)Stories Dr. Gregory D. Smithers, Viriginia Commonwealth U & U of Hull Benjamin Kapron, PhD candidate, York University Dr. Michael Martin, Nicolls State University 9 to 9.15 pm CEST - Break - 9.15 to 10 pm CEST Panel 3: Thinking Literature Cecilia Heim, PhD candidate, University of Lausanne Dr. Mathilde Roza, Radboud U Nijmegen Rachel Mitchell, graduate student, U of South Dakota (Intervention paper) 10 to 10.15 pm CEST - Break - 10.15 to 11 pm Photographer Adam Sings In The Timber will show and discuss some of his visual work + Hang out in our red, blue, yellow and green break-out-room! At 11 pm End of conference, farewell and goodbye! Friday, May 14, 2021 Friday 5-6.15 pm CEST

Chair: Dr. Doro Wiese, IAS, U Warwick

Keynote Dr. Warrior Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas

Red Power on Campus from the Sixties to Today Those in Indigenous studies who research and write about Native American literature, intellectual history, social movements, education, federal policy, and related topics have long understood the importance of the 1960s and early 1970s to all these areas. Scholars and thinkers have not taken sufficient notice, however, of the ways in which college campuses not only came to have significant Native presence for the first time in that period, but also quickly emerged as places that played an important role in virtually all aspects of Native life. This address and the larger project from which it comes represent efforts to understand the social and political implications of the past half century of Native presence on campus through analysis of crisis moments in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois between 2008 and 2016. Information about keynote speaker Dr. Warrior

Dr. Warrior, Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas

Robert Warrior is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas and a citizen of the . He is the coauthor of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996) and the author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). He was one of the three authors of American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), and a member of the Native Critics Collective that produced Reasoning Together (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). He is past president of the American Studies Association and was the founding president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (2009-10). He was founding co-editor of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAISA’s journal) and is the editor of the Indigenous series at the University of Minnesota Press. Before moving to the University of Kansas, he taught at Stanford, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Illinois. In 2018 we was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Friday, 6.30 to 7.30 pm CEST Panel 1: Re-visioning the Red Power Movements

Dr. Jennifer O’Neal, University of Oregon

Beyond the : The Native American Rights Movement, 1975-1980

Dr. Matthias Voigt, Free University, Berlin

Historiographical Overview: Indigenous Cultural and Political Activism During the 1960s and 1970s and Beyond

Clementine Bordeaux, PhD candidate, UC Los Angeles

Indigenous Representation, the , and the Politics of Nostalgia: Media and Memory from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock

Chair: Dr. Will Fysh, WIRL Postdoc Fellow, IAS, U of Warwick Friday, May 14, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST: Panel 1: Re-visioning the Red Power Movements Jennifer R. O’Neal Beyond the Trail of Broken Treaties: The Native American Rights Movement, 1975-1980 This paper examines the transformative shift, beginning in the early 1970s, of organized Native American and Indigenous groups within the and Canada to internationalize Indigenous activism. It highlights reasons for the international Indigenous evolution, explores and critiques organizational and activist strategies that circumvented the nation-state, and traces how the transition increased Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, both internationally and domestically through the early 1980s. Utilizing core Indigenous decolonizing concepts, as well as evolving human rights frameworks, to expand sovereignty and self- determination, this work argues that Native American activism after the American Indian Movement shifted significantly from a domestic agenda to an international Indigenous initiative. Through a comparative case study model of four Indigenous activists groups across North America, including the International Indian Treaty Council, the National Congress of the American Indian, the National Indian Brotherhood, and the , this study examines the complexities of working across colonial imposed international borders to effect political change, the challenges faced by activists to develop a shared international Indigenous movement, and the results of working within an Indigenous transnational movement. By comparing specific organizations and key activists, this examination reveals the ways they de- centered the settler-state and sought their own ways of operating with each other and with other across borders and internationally. Moreover, it highlights the influential role of Indigenous transnational organizations in building a foundation for a larger global Indigenous movement that advocated for Indigenous human rights, sovereignty and self- determination. This study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the social, political, and historical intersections of Native American transnational activism, centered within the fields of history, foreign relations, and Native studies. This research purposefully seeks to center Native American history and international relations directly within the study of foreign relations by applying qualitative grounded theoretical methodologies, rooted in decolonizing methodologies and Indigenous research methods. Thus, this work utilizes and examines this transformative turn in international Indigenous activism through the concepts of grounded normativity, refusal, resurgence, and survivance. Jennifer R. O'Neal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon, and affiliated faculty in the History department and Robert D. Clark Honors College. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching focus on Native American, United States, and international relations history in the twentieth century to the present, with an emphasis on sovereignty, self-determination, cultural heritage, global , and activism. Her scholarship has appeared in various research journals and book chapters. She’s currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, “Beyond the Trail of Broken Treaties: The International Native American Rights Movement, 1975-1980.” O’Neal’s work is dedicated to centering Indigenous , applying decolonizing methodologies and Indigenous research methods, and developing place-based education. She is an enrolled member of The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon.. Friday, May 14, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST: Panel 1: Re-visioning the Red Power Movements

Matthias Voigt Historiographical Overview: Indigenous Cultural and Political Activism During the 1960s and 1970s and Beyond This presentation seeks to review historical scholarship and scholarly approaches to the Red Power era. The was primarily concerned with political rights (, civil rights, religious freedom, self-determination), and social concerns (socioeconomic conditions in cities and on reservations), but it was equally about personal and cultural identity. In a sense, the Red Power Movement was a far-reaching attempt of a marginalized minority within a larger encapsulating society to remake self and society. This historiography on the Red Power Movement seek to address recent trends and gaps in scholarship, as well as approaches worth pursuing. Hitherto, historiography has focused on particular events (Alcatraz, Wounded Knee), federal Indian policies (the turning away from termination towards self-determination), as well as the entire period of Indigenous activism. Recently, scholarship has pushed beyond the widely known 1968-1973 or 1969-1978 timeframes, applying transnational perspectives (Indigenous activism with the larger Cold War context). Scholars have filled significant gaps in research by focusing on hitherto overlooked activists (Vine Deloria, Richard Oakes), organizations (the National Indian Youth Council, the National Tribal Chairman’s Association), places (the Deep South), transcultural and transnational alliances (eRed Power activists and ; or Indigenous people and Germans), and cultural (re-)production to reclaim Indigeneity. In so doing, scholars have provided fresh insights that help to better understand what is commonly regarded as the most significant period of Indigenous history of the 20th century. This shall not obscure the fact, however, that key aspects of the Red Power era have only been scratched on the surface. Understudied areas that help to better understand this era touch upon race, nationalism, and culture. Local and national studies –or, for that matter, those transcending well-established boundaries–warrant further scholarship, as the Red Power Movement has barely been scratched on the surface. It may also come as a surprise that more conservative organizations (such as the National Tribal Chairman’s Association) may have instigated more change that hitherto acknowledged as much scholarship has largely focused activist organizations such as AIM. This presentation seeks a) to address past historiography& current scholarly trends; b)to identify gaps in research; and c) to make suggestions into areas of research that warrant further exploration.

Matthias Voigt finished his doctoral degree at the Goethe University of Frankfurt in April 2019. His doctoral dissertation, entitled Re-Inventing the Warrior, Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Indian Country, examines the ways in which Indigenous men reinvented self and society within the struggle against colonial domination during the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, the dissertation examines particular constructions of warrior masculinity that emerged within the context of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and against the larger backdrop of the . The dissertation -which is currently revised for submission to a university press-seeks to shed fresh perspectives on complex processes of gendered nation- building of a marginalized minority within a larger encapsulating society. The dissertation was part of the DFG-funded project “Marginalized Masculinities and the American Nation,” supervised by Prof. Dr. Simon Wendt at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Friday, May 14, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST: Panel 1: Re-visioning the Red Power Movements Clementine Bordeaux Indigenous Representation, the American Indian Movement, and the Politics of Nostalgia: Media and Memory from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock

The early activism of the American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in 1968, is a source of complicated nostalgia for Indigenous activists today. AIM’s participation in the historic occupations including Wounded Knee 1973 remain instructive touchstones for present-day Indigenous struggle, but are often characterized by important settler limitations, including a pronounced masculinism. Most of the iconic and widely circulated images of AIM are products of a colonial gaze that emphasizes stark heteronormativity at the expense of Indigenous conceptions of relationality. This emphasis reproduces a taxidermic view of Indigenous people (Rony 1996), compounding the challenges of self-representation for Indigenous media-makers today. I juxtapose mainstream representations of AIM at Wounded Knee 1973 with current Indigenous made media, focusing on Sky Hopinka's 2017 film Dislocation Blues which offers an experimental documentation of the Standing Rock #NoDAPL movement. Hopinka's film demonstrates emancipatory gender politics to consider self-representational strategies for new media that confronts a dominant confinement of AIM’s image without disavowing the legacy of Indigenous activism. Foregrounding the importance of tribal specificity and relationalty, I engage with media produced on and of Lakota tribal .

Clementine Bordeaux (Sičáŋǧu Oglála Lakóta) is a doctoral candidate in the World Arts and Cultures department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Clementine received a Master’s degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, through the Native Voices Indigenous documentary film program and an undergraduate degree in Theatre from Carthage College. Clementine also sits on the Board for Cornerstone Theatre Company (LA) and is a collaborator for Racing Magpie arts consulting organization in South Dakota. Research interests include: Lakota ontology, Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous representation, visual anthropology, digital/new media, and community based participatory research. Friday, May 14, 8-8.45 pm CEST: Panel 2: Rewriting the Red Power Movements

Dr. Gayatri Devi, Associate Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania

The Alcatraz Palimpsest in Tommy Orange’s

Dr. Doro Wiese, WIRL Fellow, IAS, U of Warwick, Assistant Professor, RU Nijmegen

“Momaday in the Movement Years“: Searching for Epistemic Justice

Chair: Giulia Champion, Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow, IAS, U of Warwick Friday, May 14, 8-8.45 pm CEST: Panel 2: Rewriting the Red Power Movements

Gayatri Devi The Alcatraz Palimpsest in Tommy Orange’s There There Native American novelist Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There (2018) is a contemporary retelling and indigenous response to the 1969 indigenous occupation of the island prison of Alcatraz (1969-1971). The 1969 occupation has been variously described as an act of “civil disobedience,” “engaged resistance,” and “a spiritual reawakening” of the indigenous people of the United States. During the occupation, the indigenous activists physically transformed the prison into a for free Indians. The indigenous occupiers wrote poems, stories, proclamations and manifestos, established the radio station Radio Free Alcatraz, performed dances and ceremonial rituals, and instituted regular classes where crafts, languages and rituals were taught to a new generation of urban Native Americans. Native American movements at (1970), the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972), the Occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1972), the Wounded Knee incident (1973), the Longest Walk (1978) all claim the Alcatraz occupation as the flame that lit the spark of indigenous activism in the United States. Orange’s novel transforms, or rather, reveals the Alcatraz experience as a palimpsest for the history of indigenous people’s activism towards self-determination and liberty in an occupied land. The novel is narrated through the points of views of twelve major indigenous characters, both men and women, young and old, who all live in the impoverished urban ghetto of Oakland, California. Each character labors under unprocessed trauma on a personal as well as intergenerational level. The contours of this history are jagged and broken with fragments that do not fit, mismatched parts and misshapen wholes, incomplete stories, and unstable memories. As a narrative device, the Alcatraz palimpsest works throughout the novel to bond the broken arc of the individual narratives that make up the novel. My paper will discuss the structure of the Alcatraz palimpsest in the novel with its narrative shadows and textual embodiments. Dr. Gayatri Devi is Associate Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, United States, where she teaches world literatures, indigenous studies, and linguistics. Her publications on South Asian, Middle Eastern, and indigenous literatures and films have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and books. Her co-edited book Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema was published in 2014 by Wayne State University Press. Most recently, she has co-edited a special issue on for the North Dakota Quarterly (Winter- Spring 2017). She is currently working on a contracted book with Rowman and Littlefield/ Lexington Books entitled Indigenous Films in North America in the Twenty First Century:“Post Indian” Storytelling (forthcoming 2021). Friday, May 14, 8-8.45 pm CEST: Panel 2: Rewriting the Red Power Movements

Doro Wiese

“Momaday in the Movement Years“: Searching for Epistemic Justice

In The People and the Word. Reading Native Non-Fiction, Osage-scholar Robert Warrior revisits the early oeuvre of Kiowa writer, painter, and scholar Navarre Scott Momaday. These works took shape at the heights of the 1960s and 1970s Red Power Movements, yet ostensibly abstain from political statements. Warrior argues that while Momaday eschewed the social movements of those times, his fictional and non-fictional works are nevertheless deeply political. Momaday expresses the “intimate links between language, literature, and experience” (144), and brings the importance of words for Indigenous peoples to the fore that help to distinguish between friend and foe, and to defend “homes and homelands” (175).

In this talk, I want to build up on Warrior’s arguments to excavate another aspect of Momaday’s considerable narrative powers and innovations, namely his ability to draw his readers into a literary world through narrative and stylistic means that are distinct from dominant Euro-Western storytelling-patterns. Focusing on Momaday’s first literary landmark, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn, I will show how Momaday establishes a relational aesthetics in this work. I will demonstrate how he continuously expresses an interplay between natural forces and life, and that storytelling provides a worlding for these interactions. To demonstrate the far-reaching consequences of Momaday’s undertaking, I will contrast his work with the character-centrism of one of his contemporaries, the German writer and scholar Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. This comparison will show that Momaday effectively shifts away and decenters Euro-Western forms of knowledge-transfers in literature, and that he seeks out an episteme that does justice to the diverse Indigenous influences he grew up with.

Doro Wiese, PhD, is a WIRL research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. Facilitated by various grants such as a Marie Skłodowska Curie scholarship of the European Union, she was trained in literary studies, film studies, and cultural studies at the University of Hamburg and Utrecht University. In her multifaceted research, Doro Wiese investigates how aesthetics is a manner of drawing people into an effective relation with the lacunae of knowledges and histories. In The Powers of the False (Northwestern UP 2014), she explores how literature can help to represent histories that would otherwise remain ineffable. Faust (Textem 2018) examines how and to what effect different media affect the human body. In her current project, titled Side by Side: Reading Indigenous and Non- Indigenous Literature, she asks which epistemological, formal, and thematic distinctions and connections are present in post-war fiction on Native North America on both sides of the Atlantic. This study helps to develop cross-cultural and cross-epistemological research fields. Doro Wiese evinces a strong commitment to the study of colonialism, transcultural epistemology, the relationship between literature and historiography, and is inspired by insights formulated in Indigenous Studies. Public Reading 9-10 pm CEST: Dr. Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle.

chair: Dr. Deanna Reder, Cree-Métis scholar, member of the Department of English and Chair of the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University, Www.SFU.ca/people/reder Si’Yam Maracle from Tsleil Waututh and is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning works including: • Ravensong; • Bobbi Lee; • Daughters Are Forever; • Celia’s Song, long listed for Canada Reads and short listed for the Re-lit award; • I Am Woman long listed for Canada Reads; • Talking to the Diaspora; • Memory Serves and other Oratories; • My Home as I Remember (award winning); • My Conversations with Canadians short- listed for the Toronto Book Award continues to be a bestselling non-fiction work; Short • Sundogs and Sojourner’s Truth and other Lee Maracle Stories; biography • Bent Box; Lee Maracle • Will’s Garden; • Hope Matters; • First Wives’ Club.

Maracle is an instructor at the University of Toronto in Indigenous Studies and First Nation’s house. Maracle served as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Toronto, Waterloo, and Western Washington and Guelph University. Maracle received the J.T. Stewart award; the Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Blue Metropolis First Nation’s literary award; the International Festival of Author’s award; the Anne Green award. Maracle received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from St. Thomas University, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from University of Waterloo. She is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Recently, Maracle was shortlisted for the Neustadt International Award. Jeannette Armstrong, Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy

Short biography Jeannette Armstrong

Jeannette Armstrong, Associate Professor in Indigenous Studies, is Syilx Okanagan. She has always sought to change deeply biased misconceptions related to Indigenous people. She is the recipient of the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Armstrong is Vice-President of Theytus Books https://www.theytus.com/ the En’owkin Centre, and serves on the board of the Indigenous Editors Association. Slash, which Armstrong published in 1985, is considered by many as the first novel by a First Nations woman. Her research in Indigenous philosophies and Okanagan Syilx thought and environmental ethics coded into Syilx oral literatures has been recognized locally and globally. She is a recipient of the Eco Trust USA Buffett Award in Indigenous Leadership and serves on Canada’s Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge Subcommittee of Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada (COSEWIC). Saturday, May 15, 2021 Saturday, May 15, 2021, 5 to 6.15 pm CEST Keynote Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, UCLA

Chair: Dr. Doro Wiese, IAS, U Warwick Saturday, May 15, 2021, 5 to 6.15 pm CEST (chair: Dr. Doro Wiese)

Keynote Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, UCLA

Indigenous Graffiti: Gender and the (Re)Making of Public Spaces

This talk will examine how Indigenous people, relegated by the settler state as expendable and erasable graffiti, are working against capitalist and state ordinances at various scales. Rather than understand this as a subjugated positionality, I posit that graffiti is the critique necessary and valuable to understanding interlocking structures of oppression. Graffiti is the memories and practices of gendered forms that undo the evidence of our subjugation, of land as merely property, and the separation of the human and non-human. Cultural Production and everyday acts of resurgence has the force to undo a colonial unknowing , defined by Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein as “Produced and practiced in concert with material violences and differential devaluations” that are “striv[ing] to preclude relational modes of analysis and ways of knowing otherwise.” Our productions of Indigenous forms of graffiti, and indeed our very bodies, are anti-colonial tools. Indians are the beautiful “graffiti,” in the words of Leeanne Betasamosake Simpson, denying settler permanence. Our art, bodies and actions are embodied sovereignty on the settler landscapes meant to erase and eradicate the Indigenous forms of relationality. Information about keynote speaker Dr. Mishuana Goeman

Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, UCLA

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is a Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School. As the inaugural Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA, she aims to work broadly with Native Nations and Indigenous peoples. She is the author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World (University of Nebraska Press). Her two community-based digital humanities projects aim to provide information to a wider public. Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015) gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities and Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. Book chapters are included in Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (Routledge 2016), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies (2016), Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Duke University Press, 2017) and a forthcoming chapter in Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Life: Settler-colonialism and Indigenous Presences (Duke University Press). She also publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals, including guest edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. In 2020- 2021, she is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University of Buffalo located in her home territories.. Saturday, May 15, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST, Panel 1: Recording/Performing Indigenous Sovereignty

Melissa Scharr, PhD candidate, Western U

Come and Listen: Indigenous music videos as rhetorical sovereignty, performative resistance and cross-cultural education

Justin Moir, IS, Dalhousie U

“because of everything, we are doing well”: Securing Indigenous Futurity through Performance in Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost

Ulia Gosart, IS, UCLA Indigenous Librarianship and changing the practices of managing Indigenous records and knowledge

Chair: Clementine Bordeaux, doctoral candidate, UCLA Saturday, May 15, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST, Panel 1: Recording/Performing Indigenous Sovereignty

Melissa Scharr

Come and Listen: Indigenous music videos as rhetorical sovereignty, performative resistance and cross-cultural education

Launching in 1981, MTV (short for Music Television) popularized the burgeoning audio-visual format known as the music video, transforming music from a solely aural experience into a form of visual storytelling. Indigenous artists have taken up this form and made it their own. Highly political, this new intellectual tradition reclaims and resignifies old knowledges while also building toward new Indigenous futurities through assertions of rhetorical sovereignty and performative resistance. “We are not a conquered people”, the Halluci Nation (2016) states unequivocally in the music video for “The Virus”; this message is inscribed across the modern storyscape of Indigenous music videos as a sustaining chorus embedded in the lyrics, images and sonic elements of this intellectual form. Through a careful examination of DJ Shubb’s (2016) “Indomitable”, N’we Jinan’s (2017) “Come and Listen” and Prolific and A Called Red’s (2017) “ Snakes”, this presentation seeks to highlight the richness of Indigenous music videos as enactments of Indigenous sovereignty and resistance. Additionally, these enactments are invaluable teaching tools that educators, especially non- Indigenous educators, can engage as a means to bring authentic voice and experience into the classroom. These visual stories of struggle, identity, resistance and reclamation are worth telling and worth teaching; through the music video form, Indigenous artists continue to redefine indigeneity in the face of colonialism, racism and ignorance. I invite you to come and listen.

Melissa Schnarr is an Anishinaabe kwe from Deshkan Ziibii (London, Ontario). She is a writer, educator and community builder and is currently pursuing a PhD in Education at Western University. Her research explores how urban public schooling impacts Indigenous cultural identity and how Indigenous youth assert their cultural identity in spite of these impacts. She is also a published author and poet. Saturday, May 15, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST, Panel 1: Recording/Performing Indigenous Sovereignty

Justin Moir

“because of everything, we are doing well”: Securing Indigenous Futurity through Performance in Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost

Though thoroughly distinct in both character and situation, the various Indigenous speakers of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s This Accident of Being Lost are joined by a persistent and present self-awareness. They are keenly aware of the aspects that form their identities, addressing and engaging with the formations of queerness, mental health, and Indigeneity that constitute their self perception, presentation, and image. They are fully formed in their acknowledgement of the disparate facets of their being, made whole and definite by the way they choose to represent the complexities that compose their ideas of self. This aspect of choice is vital; in their decisions and assertions of self they create an objective reality of both self and culture. Indeed, this seems to be the suggestion that underlies the piece: by publicly presenting native cultural identity the culture itself is defined and asserted, the display itself a force for the preservation and legitimization of suppressed nationhood. In this collection, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asserts that the performance and presentation of Indigeneity is necessary for the formation and assertion of cohesive native culture and identity. I intend to explore this through the examination of the formative capability of performance in its ability to form generational bonds, contemporize and relativize cultural practice, and suggest and project a notion of futurity. Not only creative, I will address how performance functions as an act of resistance in its ability to confront conceptions of indigenous identity derived from settler-colonial depictions, its capacity to subvert western culture, and its ability to reveal the continuation of oppressive Western colonial structures.

Justin Moir is currently an independent scholar and teaching assistant at Dalhousie University. Having completed his Masters in English Literature at Dalhousie in 2019, writing on settler-American conceptions of nationhood and self through the lens of the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft, he intends to begin his doctoral studies this year with a focus on representations of queerness in American Gothic fiction. He is particularly interested in conceptions and creations of self and identity in American literature, particularly in their appearance at the intersection of Modernist literature and horror fiction. Saturday, May 15, 6.30-7.30 pm CEST, Panel 1: Recording/Performing Indigenous Sovereignty

Ulia Gosart Indigenous Librarianship and changing the practices of managing Indigenous records and knowledge

This presentation examines the potential of Indigenous Librarianship as means of change to the discipline and mainstream practices of librarianship and archival science. The presentation briefly examines the history of tribal libraries, and practices of handling Indigenous knowledge by non-Indigenous institutions from the post-war period until present in the U.S. The presentation stresses the developments of the past decade during which rights of tribal communities to benefit from traditional knowledge slowly gained recognition among the U.S. professionals and scholars. It discusses relevant good practices, and highlights difficulties and problems. It applies the notion of Indigeneity as a tool supporting Indigenous communities rights to control their intellectual heritage, and introduces the emerging field of Indigenous Librarianship as theory, practices and means of social action supporting these rights.

Ulia Gosart, UCLA IS. Ulia is a scholar who examines the impact of institutional constrains on policies concerning Indigenous populations with a focus on Indigenous rights to knowledge and records. She is a descendent of Udmurts, indigenous people of the south-eastern Siberia (Russia), and was born in the former Soviet Union. Her scholarly work emerged from her advocacy, beginning with her service to an indigenous organization from Russia, LIENIP (2004-2009), and her ongoing collaboration with Indigenous politicians and scholars from North America and former Soviet states. Her relevant publications examining Indigenous rights to knowledge and records recently appeared in American Libraries Magazine and IFLA Journal. Saturday, May 15, 8 to 9 pm CEST,

Panel 2: Place-Based-Knowledge and Environmental (Hi-)Stories

Dr. Gregory D. Smithers, Professor of History at Virginia U, and a British Academy Global Professor based at the U of Hull Before the Water Protectors: A Recent History of Cherokee Medicine, Archaeology, & Environmental Survivance

Benjamin J. Kapron, PhD candidate, York U “The wilderness vanish[es] in tragic narratives”: The Trent- Severn Waterway and the Survivance of Land

Dr. Michael Martin, Associate Professor Nicholls State U Place-Based, Indigenous Forms of Knowledge in The Cherokee Wonder Stories

Chair: Dr. Matthias Voigt, FU Berlin Saturday, May 15, 8 to 9 pm CEST, Panel 2: Place-Based-Knowledge and Environmental (Hi-)Stories

Gregory D. Smithers: Before the Water Protectors: A Recent History of Cherokee Medicine, Archaeology, & Environmental Survivance Before the Water Protectors at Standing Rock attracted international headlines, three Cherokees became the unlikely heroes of an effort to renew their medicinal traditions, preserve their archaeological heritage, and protect the biodiversity of a region that gave their sense of place in the world its meaning. This is the story of Ammoneta Sequoyah, Richard Crowe, and Gilliam Jackson, three Cherokees who inspired a movement and took the United States government to court. To understand the place of Sequoyah, Crowe, and Jackson in recent Indigenous and environmental history I have to take you back to the late 1930s. Just prior to the United States entering World War II, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) drew up plans to flood the Little Tennessee River and create the Tellico Dam. TVA officials argued that because this region of the United States received more rainfall than anywhere outside of the Pacific Northwest, such a dam was vital to the economic growth of Tennessee and the southern Appalachia. The Tellico Dam project lay dormant until the 1960s, when, under the leadership of Aubrey Wagner, the TVA renewed its efforts to build the dam. However, the location of the dam outraged Cherokees because it was slated to be built on the site of the most prominent eighteenth-century Cherokee city: Chota. Nestled along the banks of the Little T, Chota’s archaeological treasures, its nearby burial grounds, and floodplain thick with medicinal herbs was a living trove of Cherokee medicine, history, and culture. This essay reveals the largely forgotten role that Sequoyah, Crowe, and Jackson took in protecting a small piece of the spiritual, archaeological, and ecological inheritance of their people. Their actions inspired scores of others – from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, to a young Cherokee historian by the name of Duane King, a promising Cherokee poet named Marilou Awiakta, and thousands of Indigenous people and non-Native allies from around the United States. Environmental historians remember the “fight to save the Little T” as an effort to test the Endangered Species Act (1973) and protect the snail darter, a minnow on the verge of species collapse. But as I argue in this essay, the words and deeds of Sequoyah, Crowe, and Jackson revealed how red power was used in a multiplicity of ways, and for the purposes of renewing Cherokee medicinal traditions, preserving tribal archaeology, and ensuring the survivance of local ecosystems and the peoples they nourish.

Gregory D. Smithers: I am Professor of History and Eminent Scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a British Academy Global Professor based at the University of Hull’s Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. I am the author of eight books, including The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity (Yale University Press, 2015) and my most recent book Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal (Oklahoma University Press, 2019). The above paper is part of a larger project entitled The Riverkeepers: The Cherokees, Their Neighbors, and the Rivers that Made America. Saturday, May 15, 8 to 9 pm CEST, Panel 2: Place-Based-Knowledge and Environmental (Hi-)Stories

Benjamin J. Kapron: “the wilderness vanish[es] in tragic narratives”1: The Trent-Severn Waterway and the Survivance of Land The Trent-Severn Waterway is a 386-kilometer-long system of locks, dams, and canals built onto waterbodies throughout Central Ontario, Canada, in order to connect Lake Ontario with Georgian Bay. Built throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to facilitate colonial settlement, logging, and commercial shipping, the waterway had devastating impacts on the Indigenous Anishinaabe Peoples whose territory it cut through, and on the Land itself. This paper investigates times when elements of Land—particularly waters and rocks—resisted the construction of the waterway—events such as floods, rockslides, and collapses. The author recasts these events as agential enactments of “survivance” in an effort to bring Land more focally into settler examinations of . Ongoing scholarly discussions of decolonization tend to privilege dominant Western understandings of Land―i.e. discussing the redistribution of material land―while failing to engage with Indigenous understandings of Land. Many Indigenous Peoples hold that Land has agency, spirit, animacy, and personhood. Indigenous scholars such as Glen Sean Coulthard (in Red Skin, White Masks) bring this understanding of Land into their discussions of decolonization, acknowledging Land to be an agent and teacher of decolonization. Understanding Land to be just an expanse of space or a passive material object distances decolonial theories and praxes from Indigenous knowledges and lifeways, undermining the real decolonial merit of such projects. promotes in Narrative Change the concept of “survivance” to affirm that Indigenous Peoples’ continued survival against settler colonialism is active and agential: Indigenous Peoples are not merely passively still alive despite settler colonialism; they continuously undertake strategies to survive against settler colonialism and maintain their ways of life. Understanding Land’s continued survival against settler colonial imposition through a lens of survivance similarly affirms Land to be an active agent against settler colonialism—one that settlers may learn from as we strive towards decolonization. Benjamin J. Kapron is a Ph.D. candidate in York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (Tkaronto / Toronto, Canada), exploring how he might develop and inform his decolonial and ethical praxes, as a settler, through understanding Land to be a decolonial agent and teacher. Ben looks to learn particularly from Lands where he has lived, namely, Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada), Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Canada), and Baawitigong (Sault Ste. Marie, Canada). In his work, Ben aims to bring into conversation environmental ethics and philosophy; decolonization, Indigenous studies, and settler colonial studies; and critical environmental thought challenging human exceptionalism and exemptionalism. Ben is the managing editor of UnderCurrents: journal of critical environmental studies. His Ph.D. research is supported by a Government of Canada Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship. Saturday, May 15, 8 to 9 pm CEST, Panel 2: Place-Based-Knowledge and Environmental (Hi-)Stories

Michael Martin Place-Based, Indigenous Forms of Knowledge in The Cherokee Wonder Stories

In the field of Early American Studies of Native American literature, recent calls from a collective group of authors seeking to establish indigenous methods suggest that “NAIS materials and methods have yet to influence early American studies’ structures in an enduring and substantial way” (Mt. Pleasant, Wigginton, Wisecup 414). The call from this collective group, published in the journal Early American Studies, and the Red Power movement is clear: A reframing of the field in terms of Native American epistemologies and Native American languages. As an Anglo-American scholar in the field, I have tried to learn the Cherokee language, despite the difficult syllabary, in my own reframing of Cherokee wonder stories as forms of transmitted culture memory. An awareness of James Mooney’s late-19th-century ethnographic role in recording these stories is imperative to understanding such a cultural transmission. My argument is that these early indigenous forms of orature could be understood through the recent ‘sovereignty’ turn in Native American Studies. I incorporate Dominic O’Sullivan’s 2020 work on sovereignty and self-determination, what he terms as “[d]iscourses of sovereignty [that] open and close different political and theoretical spaces” for indigenous-centered “terms of belonging” (We Are All Here to Stay 2020). This presentation identifies Cherokee wonder stories as early indigenous epistemologies re- created through interchangeable forms of collective authorship. Specifically, I argue that the storytellers re-create pre-encounter Cherokee settlements as the settings for the ‘wonder stories’ cycle. Other stories in Myths of the The Cherokee and from Southeastern tribes do not foreground a specific place, town, and setting, including named rivers, as do the ones under the ‘wonder stories’ cycle. Michael S. Martin is an Associate Professor of English at Nicholls State University, located in Southern Louisiana, United States. He specializes in 19th-century American literature and has published his work in Postmodern Culture, Studies in American Indian Literatures, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and a variety of other journals. His fields of interest include New England Transcendentalism, Native American literature, Appalachian Studies, and colonial American literature." Saturday, May 15, 9.15-10 pm, CEST Panel 3: Thinking Literature

Cécile Heim, PhD candidate, U of Lausanne Invoking Deer Woman: The Feminist Politics of Storytelling in Franci Washburn’s Elsie’s Business

Mathilde Roza, Associate Professor, RU Nijmegen “The Way History Lands on a Face:” Tommy Orange’s There There, the evolution of Native American writing and non- indigenous readership

Rachel Mitchell, graduate student, U of South Dakota

Intervention Paper -- Uncovering Voices: The Female Body and Race in the Poetry of Heid E. Erdrich

Chair: Dr. Gayatri Devi, Associate Professor Lock Haven U Saturday, May 15, 9.15-10 pm Panel 3: Thinking Literature

Cécile Heim Invoking Deer Woman: The Feminist Politics of Storytelling in Franci Washburn’s Elsie’s Business One Indigenous intellectual tradition that has arguably developed the most since the Red Power Movements is Indigenous feminist and queer theories. In their article “Decolonizing Feminism,” Maile Arvin (Kanaka Maoli), Eve Tuck (Unangax), and Angie Morrill (Klamath) define the term “Native feminist theories” as including all theories which “make substantial advances in understandings of the connections between settler colonialism and both heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism” (11). This paper examines the ways in which Franci Washburn’s (Lakota and Anishinaabe) representation of violence against Indigenous women in her first novel, Elsie’s Business, portrays Lakota feminism and, by doing so, reinforces Lakota sovereignty. The novel narrates the life of Elsie Roberts, who is Black and Lakota. The narrative starts as she is physically and sexually assaulted by three white men after which the local sheriff department removes her to a small town called Jackson where she rebuilds her life under the watch of Nancy, a white housewife, and Father Horst, the local, white priest. This paper argues that Elsie’s Business underlines the ways in which gender violence and motherhood coerce women into the maintenance of hetero-patriarchal capitalism and deploys contemporary versions of Deer Woman and Anukite to this violence. By featuring these Lakota figures in a novel that discusses violence against Indigenous women in the contemporary United States, Washburn adapts these figures’ meanings to contemporary issues and context. Furthermore, she also enables an understanding of the ways in which settler colonialism and its capitalist regime creates and perpetuates the kind of violence faced by Indigenous women today. Brought together, these elements show how Elsie’s Business offers a contemporary take on the relationship between white and Indigenous feminisms as it performs Lakota feminism.

Cécile Heim is a Swiss & French doctoral candidate in North American literatures and cultures as well as in feminist and gender studies at the University of Lausanne. Her dissertation examines the representation of violence against Indigenous women and girls in the novels of four contemporary Indigenous writers: (Anishinaabe), Franci Washburn (Lakota), Eden Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk), and Katherena Vermette (Métis). Cécile’s most recent publications are an entry on Stephen Graham Jones in the Literary Encyclopedia and “Unsettling Private Property in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit” in SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Literature and Language). Saturday, May 15, 9.15-10 pm Panel 3: Thinking Literature

Mathilde Roza “The Way History Lands on a Face:” Tommy Orange’s There There, the evolution of Native American writing and non-indigenous readership

In 2014, during a public lecture, author Thomas King refused to answer a question from a non-indigenous person in the audience who asked help on “how to approach” Native people. His painful response to a painful question signals a collapse of communication which can be ascribed to centuries of colonial abuse, including misrepresentation, non- communication, exclusion and silence. Thomas King refused to be “mined” for the benefit of a non-native person, demanding greater effort. I was reminded of this moment when reading There There. Coming to the text from a non-indigenous, European, perspective I was struck by the novel’s enormously powerful pedagogic content, especially present in the book’s Prologue and Interlude. There There is a warm gun, painfully and forcefully driving insights home about the legacies of settler colonialism, its ongoing destructive effects, and the violence inflicted on native bodies and the land.

It is not my intention to mine this text for helpful strategies for the non-native reader. At the same time, dare I say it, Orange’s text also offers non-indigenous readers a devastating clarification. Unlike many of his predecessors, Orange has decided, it seems, to actually attempt to explain the issues, questions, decisions, legacies and options facing his characters (all contemporary urban Indians), ranging from the significance of the powwow, to alcoholism, generational trauma and the multifaceted struggles over native identity.

In my presentation, then, I want to approach There There as a novel that represents a new stage of Native American writing—evidence of a fifth wave of the Renaissance, perhaps. The novel’s descriptive power in revealing the powers of colonialism and the emotions they inspire; the clarity about the resulting issues and legacies that stand in his characters’ way; its quality of an urgent wake-up call; the invocation of violence as a central facet of both historical and contemporary native lives; and, at the same time, its forward-moving power, proclaiming indigenous presence and futurity in the city of Oakland.

Mathilde Roza is Associate Professor of North American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has specialized in American modernism and the European historical avant- garde as well as in contemporary Native American and First Nation writing and visual art. Saturday, May 15, 9.15-10 pm Panel 3: Thinking Literature

Rachel Mitchell

Intervention Paper -- Uncovering Voices: The Female Body and Race in the Poetry of Heid E. Erdrich

In my experience in 21st-century classrooms, Native American Literature is still extremely lacking in literature syllabi. Thus, students’ knowledge about Native American authors and perspectives is limited. Heid E. Erdrich is an Ojibwe author whose work is important in the Native American literary community, and yet as a Native American female poet her work is rarely taught. Her book National Monuments comments on poetry, gender, body, and place. In my paper, I uncover the significance of Erdrich’s poetry to the study of Native American literature as I show how she uncovers the marginalization and exploitation of women’s bodies through space and time in her collection National Monuments.

National Monuments uses newspaper headlines to restore the perspectives of women throughout history whose bodies have been used, abused, and put on display. In the poem “eBay Bones,” she gives a voice to a woman's skull that was dug up and sold on eBay. Erdrich explains how this Hawaiian warrior was sold to the highest bidder to potentially be used as an ashtray, ignoring the skull’s humanity by disrespecting it and its resting place. My paper uncovers how Erdrich represents gender and comments on how women’s bodies become public spaces in order to show how something similar happens to female Native American poets in literary curriculums. As Erdrich gives voice to the female bodies that become monuments and are forgotten as people, I argue that poetry collections such as Erdrich’s should be included in syllabi beyond the Native American Literature classroom.

Rachel Mitchell is a first-year graduate student at the University of South Dakota. Rachel is getting her degree in English Literature and her work focuses on Native American Literature. She was asked to present her paper “Nella Larsen’s Passing: Tethered Characters and the Assimilation to Whiteness,” at the Sigma Tau Delta: Alpha Conference, December 2020. The event was cancelled due to COVID-19. Her next presentation will be at the University of South Dakota in April on a paper titled “Transgender, Artificial Intelligence and Social Acceptance” on Jeanette Winterson’s novel Frankissstein. Rachel’s ultimate goal is to be able to teach Native American Literature at a university and educate people on their culture, literature, and history. Saturday, May 15, 10-11 pm CEST: Adam Sings In The Timber will show and discuss some of his photographs.

Afterwards: brings your own glass or cup for a post-symposium chat!