Area scholars, artists contribute to international conference on Native cultures at UW-Milwaukee

Landbody: Indigeneity’s Radical Commitments
A Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) Conference
May 5 – 7, 2016 | UW-Milwaukee | Curtin Hall 175

Landbody

Is being indigenous necessarily located in place? The Landbody conference considers how Native ideas call into question colonial assumptions about place, time, collectivity, the sacred, and the distinctions between humans and the world.

Five Native American scholars will come to Milwaukee to address these issues with other academics and the larger community: Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné | University of New Mexico), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora | Cornell University), Audra Simpson (Mohawk | Columbia University), Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate | University of Alberta), and Gerald Vizenor (The White Earth Nation | UC-Berkeley).

Moreover, faculty from research universities in Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and the United States, including UWM and Marquette University, will speak in various panels organized around the following themes: Spaces of Contestation, Re-Sources, Bodies, Confronting Being, Land Agents, Reclamation, Enacting Consciousness, Time & Story, and Indigenizing Epistemologies.

Despite a long history of colonial violence and disruptions, Native communities continue their tribal lifeways, constructing and reconstructing systems of reciprocal survival in regions and localized spaces throughout lands and other spaces occupied by and contested by colonial powers and people.

For Kennan Ferguson, conference organizer and director of the Center for 21st Century Studies, “this connection to a specific land comprises a central component of indigenous being–a commitment to place that runs contrary to current celebrations of migration, individualism, and cosmopolitanism.”

The conference will also feature drummers and singers from the Indian Community School of Milwaukee; an art/language installation by UWM faculty members Bernard Perley (Maliseet Nation | Anthropology), Margaret Noodin (Anishinaabe | English), and Cary Miller (Anishinaabe | History); and the screening of two films by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation) of UWM’s Film department. Plenary speaker Gerald Vizenor will also be reading from his newly published novel, Treaty Shirts: October 2034–A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation (Wesleyan University Press); a book signing will follow.

Sponsored by UW-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies (C21), the conference runs May 5 through May 7, 2016 in Curtin Hall, Room 175, 3243 N Downer Avenue.

The conference is free and open to the public, but we ask that people register via the conference website. The conference website also provides a schedule of speakers, abstracts of talks, and other information: http://www.c21uwm.com/landbody/

The Center for 21st Century Studies (C21), a UW System Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee campus, leads the way in imagining, defining, and creating the burgeoning field of 21st century studies, focusing on the intersection of the humanities, arts, and sciences (social and natural) with issues of compelling concern. www.c21.uwm.edu.