Professor Rand, American Indian Studies candidate

Jacki Thompson Rand,  
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Iowa

“Primary Sources  Redux: Telling and Re-telling Native History With Material Culture”

This lecture presents a new approach to indigenous history, drawing on Professor Rand’s own work on the history of the Kiowa people.  Working from a desire to take objects as historical sources and dissatisfaction with narratives based exclusively on non-Indian sources, she situates the Kiowas at the intersections of federal Indian law and policy, material culture, and gendered work to retell, in part, a canonical story.  She will also discuss a new project on historicizing violence against Native women in Mississippi, which explores the policies and practices surrounding the (non)prosecution of crimes committed against Choctaw women. 

12,000 Year Old Fishing Tackle on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands

Off the coast of California, on the islands of Santa Rosa and San Miguel, archeologists have found the remains of fishing gear. These tools have been described as stone material used with the sharp edges. Although there is no attributing these tools to a single grouping of people, there is a question being put forth about the sea faring culture that is not limited to the crossing of the Bering Straight. The remaining tools also call into question archeological claims that the Clovis sites were the earliest known remains of life in North America. These tools also "push back the chronology of New World seafaring to 12,000, maybe 13,000 years ago. It gets us a big step closer to showing that a coastal migration route happened, or was at least possible."

Spearheads and other tools found at the sites.

 See the full article at:
Scientists' amazing California discovery includes fishing tackle 12,000 years old

Professor Wilcox, American Indian Studies candidate

Michael Wilcox
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology; Archaeology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University 


"Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt:
Challenging the Narratives of Conquest"

For many people Native Americans occupy marginal spaces within both historical narratives and popular culture. Native Americans are a largely invisible population- a people who seem to disappear from both history books and contemporary society with the arrival of Europeans. Anthropology, history and archaeology are fields which have made great contributions to the study of Indigenous histories, but too frequently emphasize disease, military conquest, acculturation and missionization as explanations of invisibility- what I would describe as "terminal narratives". How true are these widely held beliefs? The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, regarded by many as the most successful Indigenous rebellion in the Americas offers a powerful counter-narrative for historians and archaeologists. Using interdisciplinary methods, I explore the relationships between colonial violence, migration, social segregation and fundamentalism during the rebellion. I suggest a new method of interpreting the past  (Indigenous archaeology) that explains the presence and vitality of Native Americans five centuries after Columbus.

Professor Lyons, American Indian Studies candidate

Scott Richard Lyons,  

Associate Professor
Department of English and American Indian Studies, Syracuse University

“The History and Theory of Boozhoo: Encountering Indigenous Culture, Language, and Conflict in the University”

Traditional Native cultures have long fascinated American intellectuals and academics.  Cooper fictionalized them, Morgan analyzed them, Boas defended them, Rothenberg imitated them, and today there are many who would seek to reclaim, restore, and revitalize them.  But what really happens when traditional Native cultures are brought into the pedagogical, extracurricular, and critical spaces of the modern university, an institution defined in large measure by a paradoxical claim to both secularism and multiculturalism?  This talk will examine two sites where traditional Ojibwe culture has recently appeared in academic contexts — a university-sponsored powwow in Minnesota, and tribal-nationalist criticism in Native literary studies—producing conflict, confusion, and sometimes cultural disappearance.  Such sites tend to be patrolled by “culture cops” (to use reservation parlance) whose appearance at this moment in history raises important questions for scholars and universities seeking to become more culturally sensitive, inclusive, and just.  Finally, since no discussion of indigenous cultural revitalization can ignore the simultaneous renewal of Native languages, we will consider the “culture words” of Ojibwemowin, the Ojibwe language, to see what they might suggest about the meanings and implications of “Ojibwe culture.”

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