Native American & Indigenous Studies
by
Native American & Indigenous Studies
// Presented by the UT Humanities Center
The purpose of this seminar is to build greater community and conversation among researchers at UT who are working–some tangentially and others centrally–on issues in Native American and Indigenous Studies, either in content, methods, or activism. The seminar draws widely on methodological and theoretical issues involving gender, sexuality, sovereignty, settler colonialism, epistemology, and environmentality. We ask questions such as: what is NAIS? What are its key methods? How does it illuminate multiple fields? What is the future of NAIS? By drawing on broad methodological readings and interdisciplinary applications we wish to demonstrate to UT admininstration and other researchers that questions of indigeneity are (or should be) at the heart of our academic inquiry, that the core issues of NAIS are at the heart of many of the fields of research represented at the University. In this seminar, we hope to bring together a vast interdisciplinary network of scholars invested in the presence of NAIS at UTK.
Events
2024-2025 Events:
Meetings held at the Denbo Center unless otherwise noted.
Fall 2024
- Tuesday, September 17 at 4pm
- Tuesday, October 15 at 4pm
- Tuesday, November 12 at 4pm
Spring 2025
- Wednesday, February 19 at 4pm
- Wednesday, March 12 at 4pm
- Monday, April 14 at 4pm
2023-2024 Meetings:
October 4, 2023 – first seminar meeting, welcome, and discuss plans for NAIS for the AY 2023-2024. Discuss article by Brooke Bauer and Elizabeth Ellis, “Indigenous, Native American, or American Indian: The Limitations of Broad Terms,” Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 1 (Spring 2023), 61-74. In-person at HC in Dunford and via Zoom.November 1, 2023 – Lisa King, facilitator. Land acknowledgments and land-grab universities. In-person at HC in Dunford and via Zoom.December 6, 2023 – DeLisa Hawke, facilitator. Discuss readings on Black Indigeneity. “Confounding the Color Line” and “On the Erasure of Black Indigeneity.”February 7, 2024 – Guest speaker Micah Swimmer (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) discussed the Cherokee language. What does the university need to do to recruit Cherokee people as students? Mentioned a designated meeting space for Native and Indigenous students, a Native American and Indigenous Studies Program broadly interdisciplinary.March 21, 2024 – Guest speaker, Dr. Hayley Negrin, University of Illinois Chicago. Gave a public talk on “Indigenous Women and Environmental Treaty-Making in Early America.”April 10, 2024 – hosted Dadiwonisi We Will Speak documentary about Cherokee efforts to preserve their language. https://calendar.utk.edu/event/movie-night- dadiwonisiwe-will-speak May 9, 2024– meet with visiting scholar, Taryn Walker from Simon Frasier University. Walker is an interdisciplinary Indigenous artist of Nlaka’pamux, Syilx, and mixed European ancestry.https://art.utk.edu/taryn-walker-a-visiting- scholar-from-simon-fraser- university-vancouver-canada/ May 10, 2024: planning for next year