NAISI Welcomes Dr. Laura Harjo (Mvskoke) to Emory University as a Distinguished Fellow in Indigenous Knowledge for the 2023-24 academic year.

Laura Harjo is a Muscogee (Creek) scholar, award-winning author, Indigenous planner, and teacher. She is an associate professor and the previous interim chair in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Emory University. Her scholarly inquiry focuses on “community.” Harjo’s research and teaching centers on three areas: (1) spatial storytelling, (2) anti-violence-informed Indigenous architecture and community planning, and (3) community-based knowledge production. These three areas of inquiry support a larger project of Indigenous futurity. Harjo’s book Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019) employs Muscogee epistemologies and Indigenous feminisms to offer a community-based practice of futurity. Her book won the 2020 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Monograph and the 2021 On the Brinck Book Award + Lecture.  

In 2022, she organized with colleagues at the University of Oklahoma Gibbs College of Architecture to create Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity: Spatial Storytelling with Emergent Technologies. The exhibition employs Mvskoke futurity tools and technology to understand and represent spatial, sonic, and relational elements of original tribal towns and Mvskoke Futurity. Visitors could see the spatial arrangement of two tribal towns: a Mississippian and a Pre-Removal settlement. Past and present geographies are light projected onto the surface of the models. This work seeks to surface past and future emergence geographies—concrete, ephemeral, metaphysical, and virtual—of Muscogee Tribal Towns found in pre-removal Alabama and post-removal Oklahoma. 

Laura Harjo will co-facilitate the new Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Learning Community seminar as it develops a new curriculum and programming for a new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies, with special attention to respectful engagement with Mvskoke knowledge-holders. She will be dividing her time between Atlanta and Oklahoma throughout the academic year, participating in scholarly programming, campus-wide events, and visiting undergraduate classes.

Continue to check the NAISI program calendar for updates about campus events featuring Dr. Harjo throughout the 2023-24 academic year.