Dr. Kendra Taira Field
Tufts University
Stories We Tell: Family Histories and Silences in Slavery, Freedom, and Indian Country
February 16, 2021 at 3:30 PM EST
This talk is about stories and silences. The talk will begin with the Field’s ancestors’ migratory lives in slavery, freedom, and the black and black Indian towns and settlements of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. It explores freedom’s first generation, the stories they told, the silences they kept, and legacies for subsequent generations.
Drezus
Rapper
Rhyme and Reason
February 24, 2021 at 2:30pm EST
My name is Jeremiah Manitopyes also known as Drezus from the Anishinaabe and Nehiyaw Nations of Saskatchewan, Canada. There is a deep, dark and hidden depression that comes from being born into a Residential School survivor family, but Hip-Hop music is what saved my life. The culture of unfiltered expression that lives within the music and its welcoming arms are what helped me find a love for myself, my family and my culture. I’ve lost many friends to addictions, suicide and violence so I feel I have a responsibility to tell our stories since Hip-Hop Music brought me to so many beautiful communities and spirits. I carry my Traditions proudly today as I walk sober and love passing those teachings on to those that need it. Please join me for a talk about life as an urban Indigenous Man, Hip-Hop and the Old Ways. Miigwetch
Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortíz
Professor Emeritus CSU East Bay
The white nationalist basis of the Second Amendment
March 25, 2021 at 2:30 PM EST
(Event Co-Sponsored by Public History @ Virginia Tech)
The white settlers’ violent appropriation of Native lands was inscribed as an individual right in the Second Amendment of the Constitution, second only to freedom of speech. Male colonial settlers had long formed militias to raid and raze Indigenous communities, seizing their lands and resources. The continuing significance of that right reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as a sacred right. Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture by the late 1600s they were also used as slave patrols, forming the basis of the US police culture after chattel slavery ended. That is the inseparable other half of the settler-colonial reality that is implicit in the Second Amendment. Seventy-four percent of gun owners in the US are male, and 82 percent of gun owners are white, which means that 61 percent of adults who own guns are white men, and this group accounts for 31 percent of the total U.S. population. The top reason US Americans give for owning a gun is for protection. What are the majority of white men so afraid of?
Dr. Julie L. Reed
Penn State University
Cherokee education in the wake of pandemic
April 22, 2021 at 2:00 PM EST
The 1918 flu pandemic followed on the heels of several devastating events that impacted Cherokee people in Indian Territory turned Oklahoma state. From 1898-1914 the federal government subjected the Five Tribes to the allotment of communally held lands and the dissolution of their tribal governments. Although Cherokee people, in theory, received full citizenship in the aftermath of Oklahoma statehood, Jim Crow policies and eugenics undermined the reality for many. The flu pandemic brought another wave of tragedy to Cherokee communities. Educational institutions, a crowning achievement of the Cherokees post removal, within the state of Oklahoma, became a source of further debasement. And yet, educational institutions, some much older and some new, also provided the vehicles, as they had pre-statehood, for Cherokee people to resist, maintain, and, paraphrasing ethnographer Albert L. Wahrhaftig, to change so that they could stay the same.
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