Event—McNickle Center

2021 NCAIS Spring Workshop

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NCAIS Graduate Workshop in Narrative and Research Methods

Hosted virtually by Oklahoma State University. This workshop was scheduled for March 2020, but was rescheduled for March 2021 due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Douglas Miller, History, Oklahoma State University

Dr. Lindsey Smith, English, Oklahoma State University

Our virtual and interdisciplinary workshop in Native Studies narrative and research methods invites participants to think creatively and critically about settled, unsettled, visible, and concealed features of urban places that can function as spatial archives. We ask students to explore their own home communities and institutions, or any city of their choice, and bring their findings to the group, in the interest of producing a collaborative workshop archive, derived from individual urban archives. So, rather than pore over traditional archival materials filed away in Halogen boxes stacked in research center basements, we hope to upend that standard approach and instead explore primary sources embedded in our respective cities’ historical and contemporary Indigenous avenues, spaces, structures, communities, and topographic memories. While we will read some literature in the form of monograph chapters, journal articles, maps, and Native newspapers, we are more interested in reading material embedded in Indigenous cityscapes. Whereas scholars have often cast cities merely as settler metropoles or terminals for twentieth century assimilation projects, we are interested in how Native peoples incorporated cities into their own efforts at work, education, social, and political opportunities, while creating or preserving Indian cities, and remaking, repurposing, and reclaiming Indigenous space. Ultimately, we intend to discuss how cities can be read as stories of sovereignty and survivance.

Workshop Participants:

Leila Blackbird, University of Chicago

Mark Boxell, University of Oklahoma

Maribel Estrada Calderon, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Aimee Carbaugh, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Cate Costley, University of Colorado-Boulder

Ashton Dunkley, University of Minnesota

Ally Freedman, University of Manitoba

Ed Green, Penn State University

Karen Kramer, Harvard University

Robin Olive Little Jackson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Hector Peralta, Yale University

Nicholas Perez, Cornell University

Paulina Franciszka Przystupa, University of New Mexico

Elena Telles Ryan, Princeton University

Kristina Rogers, Oklahoma State University

William Sampson, University of Washington

Angie Sanchez, Michigan State University

Enzo Toral, Northwestern University