This workshop is a joint venture between the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI-Smithsonian) and the Newberry Library. Both institutions are invaluable to scholars. The Newberry Library is home to an unparalleled collection of books, maps, and documents, and the NMAI is home to a similarly significant collection of material culture that amounts to over 800,000 catalog entries. This workshop will encourage scholars to incorporate both collections in the writing of American Indian history and Indigenous Studies. The workshop asks how we build alternative archives, and what stories clothing, beadwork, baskets, photographs, and other forms of material culture tell us about Indigenous history. How might clothing—moccasins, leggings, or jingle dresses, for example, be used to analyze broader issues of cultural change, colonialism, and even legal claims. What do musical instruments reveal about Indigenous performers? What can wild rice knocking sticks tell us about American Indian labor history? Are photographs and paintings of Indigenous life underutilized sources in the writing of Indigenous history and other scholarship? How do we find new archives, just as we ask new questions in American Indian history and Indigenous Studies?
Workshop Participants:
Jen Andrella, Michigan State University
Tarren Andrews, University of Colorado - Boulder
John Baucom, University of Oklahoma
Dusti Bridges, Cornell University
Franklin K.R. Cline, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Zach Conn, Yale University
Neil Dodge, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Zonnie Gorman, University of New Mexico
Christopher Green, University of Illinois
Blake Grindon, Princeton University
E. Bennett Jones, Northwestern University
Patrick Lozar, University of Washington
Carmen Miedema, University of Manitoba
Elan Pochedley, University of Minnesota
Sarah Sadlier, Harvard University
Joseph Zordan, Yale University