Migrant Cherokee Mothers; Dust Bowl Allotment Legacies
Presenter: Gina Caison
September 16, 2021, 4-5:30 PM EST
Location: Online. Email event organizer Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma (msuhrsy [at] emory [dot] edu) to request the meeting link. 
Sponsored by: Emory University English Department and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Emory University
Online, free, and open to university faculty, staff, and students as well as community members.

In this talk, Gina Caison examines how cultural and literary histories of the massive erosion event known as the Dust Bowl have not always engaged the Indigenous contours of the story or its relationship to representations of Indigenous women. At the center of this examination will be a consideration of the women characters in Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs’ early 1940s work, The Cream in the Well. Through an analysis of Riggs’ play constellated with the surrounding legacy of 1930s Dust Bowl imagery, Caison queries what the events collectively known as “the Dust Bowl” (regardless of their geographic proximity to the actual epicenter of the phenomenon) have to tell us about a larger settler colonial anxiety of land theft and land loss.

Bio: Gina Caison is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University where she teaches courses in southern literatures, Native American literatures, and documentary practices. Her first book Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies (UGA Press, 2018) won the 2019 C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book in southern literary studies. Along with Lisa Hinrichsen and Stephanie Rountree, she is co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU Press, 2017) and Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (forthcoming from LSU Press, 2021). She is currently President of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and she has just returned to Atlanta following a year as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, where she composed the manuscript for her current book project, Erosion: American Literature & the Anxiety of Disappearance.

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September 13, 2021. 7 PM EST
Location: White Hall Room 101
Panel Discussion will follow the screening. Free and open to the Emory community.
Please, no food or beverages. Masks are required.
Event in conjunction with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Emory University

Panelists: Jennifer Elise Foerster, Craig Womack, Deborah Miranda, Rosemary McCombs Maxey, Stacy Pratt, and Blue Tarpalechee
May 13, 2021, 4pm EST
Sponsored by: The Hightower Fund, The Department of English, The Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University

Join us for a celebration of Indigenous writing featuring both established and emerging voices in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Featured reader, Jennifer Elise Foerster, will be joined by Craig Womack, Deborah Miranda, Rosemary McCombs Maxey, Stacy Pratt, and Blue Tarpalechee. This incredible line-up of authors will share their own work as well as work by other writers who have influenced them, including Janice Gould and Durango Mendoza. This live online event is free and open to the public.

We are delighted to bring so many powerful Indigenous voices to Emory University. We offer a special welcome to Foerster, Womack, Maxey, Pratt, and Tarpalechee, all Muscogee Creek, along with Muscogee guests in attendance, as we host this event from our Atlanta campus in the Muscogee Creek homeland. Learn more about Emory’s history in relation to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Emory’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative’s Land Acknowledgement and History Statement written by Emory professors Craig Womack and Debra Vidali.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather(2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press, and associate editor of When The Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry(2020). She received her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and she is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Foerster currently teaches at The Rainier Writing Workshop and serves as the Literary Assistant to U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She is of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma.

Craig Womack isthe author of Red on Red and Drowning in Fire, and co-director, with Steve Bransford, of Hearing the Call. He teaches in the English Department at Emory University. 

Deborah Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California, with Chumash ancestry.  Her mixed-genre book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday 2013), received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award.  The author of four poetry collections, Deborah currently lives in Lexington, Virginia with her wife Margo Solod, where she is the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, teaching Native American literature, the literature of poverty, and creative writing. In May 2021 she will retire and return to the west coast 

Rosemary McCombs Maxey is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, retired clergy from the United Church of Christ, and life-long instructor of the Mvskoke language.

Stacy Pratt, Ph.D., is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is a musician, poet, book reviewer, and art writer specializing in Indigenous art.

Blue Tarpalechee is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and a PhD Student studying Native American Literature at the University of Oklahoma.

Panelist: Dr. Nicole Redvers, ND, MPH
April 7, 2021, 6pm EST
Sponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Student Initiative and Rollins School of Public Health

Indigenous Peoples are resilient peoples with deep traditional knowledges and scientific thought spanning millennia. Yet in the spirit of scientific hegemony that has pervaded most branches of Western science and practice, the democracy of knowledge has not prevailed. Epistemological pluralism is a complex term that recognizes and appreciates that in any given research or practice context, there may be several valuable ‘ways of knowing’, and that accommodating this plurality can lead to more successful integrated study and practice. In this presentation, Indigenous methodologies and ‘ways of knowing’ will be discussed through the lens of public health practice and health equity broadly.
Register here.

March 30, 2021, 4 pm EST via Zoom
Panelists: Marilyn Vann, Eli Grayson, and John Parris
Facilitator: Craig Womack
Sponsored by the Hightower Fund and Carlos Museum

The historic Supreme Court decision in the summer of 2020, when the court ruled that much of Eastern Oklahoma comes under the Major Crimes Act and still retains Native reservation status, relied heavily on the significance of the 1866 Treaty which grants Creek Freedmen full citizenship status in the Creek Nation. This panel will discuss the significance of the court’s ruling in relationship to Freedmen activists and community members seeking restoration of their tribal citizenship.
Register here.

Freedmen Claims in Relation to McGirt V. Oklahoma Freedmen Claims in Relation to McGirt V. Oklahoma

March 20, 2021, 4-5pm EST
Current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate, will read her work at an event hosted by Emory’s Rose Library.
Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series
Zoom Event is free. Advance registration required. Link

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned musician and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She became the 23rd poet laureate of the United States in 2019. She was recently appointed by the Library of Congress to a rare third term, to begin in September 2021.

This extraordinary event is all the more remarkable and celebrated by our entire community, as we are welcoming Harjo to historical Muscogee land, which Emory University and the city of Atlanta are located on.  (Land Acknowledgement and History Statement}

Harjo is the author of nine books of poetry, among them “An American Sunrise,” “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” “How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems,” and “She Had Some Horses,” and the editor of two anthologies, including the recently released “Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry.” Harjo’s first memoir, “Crazy Brave,” won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction and the American Book Award; she is working on a follow-up memoir.

She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame in 2014.

Harjo’s visit is hosted by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library and sponsored by the Hightower Fund, with support from the Emory Libraries, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.

The historic Supreme Court decision in the summer of 2020, when the court ruled that much of Eastern Oklahoma comes under the Major Crimes Act and still retains Native reservation status, relied heavily on the significance of the 1866 Treaty which grants Creek Freedmen full citizenship status in the Creek Nation. This panel will discuss the significance of the court’s ruling in relationship to Freedmen activists and community members seeking restoration of their tribal citizenship.

Dr. Cathleen Cahill (Penn State University)
March 4, 2021, 5pm, James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference
More Information
At the turn of the twentieth century Native American cultures, governments, and traditions were under sustained attack by federal policies that sought to destroy them. Policymakers drew a contrast between “modern Americans” and “primitive Indian,” ideas that were reinforced by the many images of Indians that proliferated in art, literature, and myriad other aspects of US culture. This presentation explores how three Native American suffrage activists–Marie Bottineau Baldwin (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Laura Cornelius Kellog (Wisconsin Oneida), and Gertrude Bonnin also known as Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota)–strategically used their writings and public appearances to change public opinion about Native communities and advocate for political rights and self-determination.