Carlisle is a major site of memory for many Native peoples. Our hope is that this symposium will bring together Native and non-Native scholars, leaders, artists, and community members to share their work, concerns, and perspectives. Collaboratively we want to create a space for sharing, reflection, creativity, and scholarly work. A number of invited speakers will address the following themes as they relate to Carlisle and the region: sites of memory; indigenous educational issues; relocation (or forced migration); trauma and memory: historical and intergenerational; reclamations: culture, language, and land; narratives: oral, written, and visual.
Visit the Symposium Website here or download the program!
Presenters
Jennifer Nez Denetdale
Jennifer Nez Denetdale is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Author of Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Chief Manuelito and Juanita (University of Arizona Press, 2007) and two Navajo histories for young adults, her most recent publication is an article, “Securing the Navajo National Boundaries: War, Patriotism, Tradition, and the Diné Marriage Act of 2005,” for a special issue on Native Feminisms in Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010, she was guest curator for the exhibit “HastiinCh’ilhajínídóóDiné bi Naat’áaniiBahane’: Chief Manuelito and Navajo Leaders,” now showing at the Navajo Nation Museum. Her research interests have included the uses of oral tradition to create Diné histories and examinations of Navajo Long Walk stories and memory. She is currently working on a history of Diné women. Her great, great, great grandfather, Chief Manuelito who sent two of his children to CIIS – one died in Carlisle and the other died a few weeks after being brought home.
Jacqueline Fear Segal
Jacqueline Fear-Segal is Reader in American History and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. A resident in the UK, she lived in Carlisle, PA, for two years, and taught at Dickinson College. Her research interests and writing focus on Native America. Author of White Man’s Club: schools, race, and the struggle of Indian acculturation (University of Nebraska, 2007), winner of the American Studies Network Best Book 2008, and editor of Indigenous Bodies: reviewing, relocation, reclaiming (SUNY Press, 2012), she is currently completing a monograph on the Carlisle Indian School photographs: Shadow Catchers at the Indian School: photographs, indigenous histories, and reclamations (I.B. Tauris, 2013). She co-founded and runs the Native Studies Research Network UK.
Pete Jemison
Film director G. Peter Jemison is a Heron clan Seneca from Cattaraugus. He is manager of the Ganondagan State Historic Site, a recreation of a 17th-century Seneca village, located in Victor, New York. Jemison represents the Seneca Nation of Indians on repatriation issues; serves on the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation; and formerly served on the board of directors of the American Association of Museums. He is the Faithkeeper to the Cattaragus, and the Seneca Nation Chairman of the Haudenosaunee Standing Committee on the Burial Rules and Regulations. A renowned artist and cultural specialist, he is consulted on various Haudenosaunee issues. Jemison has also served as a Consultant to the Smithsonian Institute’s Native American Museum Training Program, and to the National Endowment for the Arts. His paintings and drawings have shown in solo exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. He was the founding director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City. Jemison received a BS in art education and an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York. He is a direct descendant of Mary Jemison, the famous adoptee from the 18th century.
Maurice Kenny
Maurice Kenny, Mohawk, was born in Watertown, NY in 1929. He was educated at Butler University, St. Lawrence University, and New York University, where he studied with the eminent American poet, Louise Bogan, who helped to direct his growing sense of voice and craft. Kenny has been a leading figure in the Renaissance of Native American poetry since the 1970′s. His work has been published in almost 100 journals, including Trends, Calaloo, World Literature Today,American Indian Quarterly, Blue Cloud Quarterly, Wicazo Sa Review,Saturday Review, New York Times and Studies in American Indian Literature, where his poem “Photograph Carlisle Indian School (1879-1918)”appeared. Tekonwatonti: Molly Brant, Poems of War, first published in 1992, in now in its sixth edition. Maurice Kenny has been involved in several radio, television, and film productions: Dug-Out; Reno Hill . . . Little Big Horn, written especially for the Custer Centennial; Handing the Baton, composed and voiced over by Maurice for the animated film by Judy Fogelman and the Museum of Modern Art; and Poems, Poets and the Song with Charles Osgood on CBS TV. He won the National Public Radio Award for Public Broadcasting in 1984, and the Signal Poetry Cup Award in 1990. Kenny has served on many literary and art panels. Recently this year, he completed a reading tour of Europe.
Barbara Landis
Barbara Landis is the Carlisle Indian School Biographer for the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, PA. She maintains a web site at www.carlisleindianschool.org with the purpose of getting the names of Carlisle Indian School students to their respective nations. She assists library patrons with information about the first off-reservation government boarding school for Native American Indian children.Through her pages, a group of descendants of Carlisle Indian School students proposed and organized the installation of an historic marker at the site of the school in the Indian Cemetery at Carlisle. The marker was installed by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission August 31, 2003. In the summer of 2000, she was one of the principle organizers of Pow-Wow 2000: Remembering Carlisle Indian School. Her tour of the CIIS was produced and filmed as an hour-long televised event for the popular PCN Tours featured on cable TV. She is author of a number of essays, among them “Putting Lucy Pretty Eagle to Rest” published in “Boarding School Blues” by the University of Nebraska Press in 2006, and “To the Height of Civilization,” published in “The Oneida Indians in the Age of Allotment, 1860-1920 by University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.
N. Scott Momaday
The American literary world offers no greater award than the Pulitzer Prize. In 1969 the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to House Made of Dawn, a first novel from an unknown author. This was unusual enough; even more surprisingly, to some observers, the winner was a Kiowa Indian who had grown up largely in the reservations and pueblos of the Southwest, far from supposed centers of learning and letters.”I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.”
As a whole world of readers and critics were soon to learn, there are no limits to N. Scott Momaday’s talents or his vision. As novelist, scholar, painter, printmaker and — above all — poet, Momaday’s work has encompassed a panorama as wide as the western landscapes he celebrates. In Momaday’s work and career, we see an extraordinary fusion of modern Anglo-American literary methods and classical prosody, with Native American traditions of poetry and story-telling.
Through his novels, poems, plays, books of folk tales and memoirs, essays and speeches, he has won international respect, not only for himself, but for the Native traditions that inform his work. At the same time, he has helped to reacquaint the modern world with an ancient understanding of the intimate connection between humankind and the natural world. N. Scott Momaday is featured in the award-winning documentary film Remembered Earth: New Mexico’s High Desert.
Jolene Rickard
Jolene Rickard is a visual historian, artist, and curator interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She is currently a recipient of a Ford Foundation Research Grant and is conducting research in the Americas, Europe, New Zealand and Australia culminating in a new journal on Indigenous aesthetics, and has a forthcoming book on Visualizing Sovereignty. She served as Interim Chair for the Art Department 2009-2010 and is an affiliated faculty member in the American Indian Program at Cornell University. She is a 2010-2011 recipient of a Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship on the thematic topic of “Global Aesthetics.” http://www.arts.cornell.edu/histart/rickard.html
Carolyn Rittenhouse
Carolyn Rittenhouse is a tribal member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota; her Lakota name, given by her parents is Hwo Was’te Winyan which is “Good Voice Woman”. She is a Millersville University graduate and will display her Plains Indian Tipi Project, a senior project required to complete an Anthropology degree at Millersville University of PA. The tipi was given to Carolyn by her stepfather, Gilbert Red Dog, in summer 2010. In July 2011,Carolyn received a grant from the Millersville University Women’s Commission and the Commission on Cultural Diversity that allowed her to travel to Cheyenne River to do research and conduct interviews regarding the tipi’s origin and its connection to Lakota Sioux cultural history and stories. As a result, the paintings on the tipi represent three major themes: The Battle of Little Big Horn, 1876, The Buffalo Calf Woman Brings Sacred Pipe, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890. Carolyn designed the tipi, and Lakota artist Dwayne Wilcox sketched it using a Ledger-style art form. She has worked extensively on the Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge Reservations of South Dakota, in Pennsylvania, and at Millersville University to educate others on the lives, sacred sites, and traditions of Native peoples.
The 20-foot tipi will be displayed in the atrium of the Waidner-Spahr Library of Dickinson College, September 25-October 6, 2012. Her presentation is on Saturday, October 6th at 11:10 AM, the library address is: 333 W. High Street, Carlisle PA 17013.
Daniel Castro Romero
Daniel Castro Romero, Jr., M.S.W., Doctoral Student, Borderland Histories, University of Texas El Paso, General Council Chairman of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, Oral Historian, Representative for Indigenous Peoples at UN. Anthropological Report on the Cúelcahén Ndé: Lipan Apache of Texas (co-edited by Daniel Castro Romero, Jr., 2004, 471 pp.; author of Cúelcahén Ndé: The Castro’s of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas, 2004, 62 pp. Anthropological Report.
The Lost Ones: Long Journey Home documents the story of two Lipan Apache children captured along the Texas-Mexican border in 1877 by the 4th U.S. Cavalry. After the massacre of their village known as the “Day of Screams,” the children rode with the Calvary for three years before being taken to the Carlisle Industrial Indian School (CIIS) in Pennsylvania. Ties with their family were completely severed. The only legacy the children left was Kesetta’s three year-old son who became the youngest child ever to be enrolled at CIIS. While the family remembered the Lost Ones every year, they never knew what had happened to the children or where they were buried until two centuries later. This documentary reveals the mystery of how in 2009 on the anniversary of Remolino, Lipan Apache descendants from California, Texas, and New Mexico came to Carlisle to offer blessings so the children could be sent home. Produced by Susan Rose and Manuel Saralegui in collaboration with Daniel Castro Romero, Jr., General Council Chairman Lipan Apache Band of Texas and Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Professor of American Studies, University of East Anglia.
Margo Tamez
Margo Tamez, PhD (Washington State University, 2010); M.F.A., (Arizona State University, 1997) is Assistant Professor, Cross-Appointed in Indigenous Studies & Gender-Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was born in the traditional Ndé Territory of Kónítsąąíí Gokíyaa (Big Water Lipan Country), in Austin, Texas. Her mother Eloisa Garcia Tamez (Ha’da didla’ Ndé, Kónítsąąíí Ndé) of El Calaboz, Texas and father Luis Carrasco Tamez, Jr. (Zuazuandé, Cuélcahéndé) were born and raised in South Texas and in the binational indigenous customary lands on both sides of the ‘Big Water’, or Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, bifurcated by the Mexico-U.S. Border. Tamez is recognized across and between the U.S., in sectors of Canada and Mexico, and internationally for advocacy, organizing, and grass-roots empowerment by, with, for, and alongside Indigenous communities currently bifurcated by the Mexico-U.S. international boundary and the border wall.
Between 1994-2006, Tamez’ community work alongside Indigenous Mexican migrants and women in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico challenging work-place injustice, environmental injustice, and human rights violations were catalysts which led her back to her homeland, and to address in scholarship, poetry, and law the ongoing crisis related to settler colonialism in Texas and the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the unresolved issues of genocides, death marches, killing fields, abductions, forced assimilation, boarding schools, sexual violence and dispossession relative to Indigenous nations bifurcated by a militarized border.
In August 2007, the United States government agencies, U.S.-based corporations and local authorities constructed the border wall across the middle of her ancestral community, in the maternal village of El Calaboz Rancheria, on the Texas-Mexico border. Along with her mother, Eloisa García Tamez, she was mandated by Indigenous Elders and peoples, among them the Ndé Chiefly societies, and members of vulnerable communities in the region, to take actions directed toward the international policy and diplomacy arena, based upon indigenous principles, protocols and ethics of self-governance and autonomous decision making. With the community’s consent and participation, Tamez and her mother co-directed the Indigenous peoples’ perspectives with legal partners in the development of national and international legal investigations challenging and confronting the U.S. government on Lipan Apache and related indigenous genocides, a trail of dispossession, Lipan Aboriginal Title, Indigenous land grants with the Crown of Spain.
Today, working alongside Indigenous experts in Canada and the U.S., Tamez is presently writing a historical book about Lipan Apaches of Kónítsąąíí Gokíyaa, which sheds light on and prioritizes nineteen generations of diverse indigenous historical perspectives which document Ndé worldviews and experiences. She argues that current-day Lipan Apaches are game changers, and they are recovering historical evidence to demonstrate a legal genealogy of forced dispossessions stemming from the 16th century to the 21st century border wall. Through it all, Ndé never ceded Aboriginal Title to the homeland, nor settled land claims in Spanish, Mexican, nor U.S. tribunals, nor received payment from the nation-states for the organized, forced and coerced dispossession of lands, territories, and resources. Margo Tamez is the author of Raven Eye and Naked Wanting. Relatives of hers were sent to the Carlisle Indian School after a series of genocides and killing fields forced the Lipan Apache into forced diaspora in the Texas-Mexico borderlands between 1872-1873.
Dovie Thomason
Dovie Thomason is an award-winning storyteller, recording artist and author. As a child she learned old Indian stories from her Kiowa Apache and Lakota relatives, especially her grandmother and her father. She began telling stories “publicly,” while teaching literature and writing at an urban high school in Cleveland. In the twenty years since then, she has shared stories throughout North America and overseas: with NASA and Indian Education programs on reservations, Shakespeare’s “Globe Theatre” and the National Geographic Society, NPR’s “Living on Earth,” and the BBC’s “My Century,” cross-community programs in Northern Ireland, powwows, conferences, schools and libraries from Belgium to California.
She has been a featured teller at major festivals and has had extended engagements at the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theater, Wolf Trap, the Kennedy Center, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival. The National Endowment has recognized her commitment to traditional cultural arts and education as a Master Traditional Teaching Artist for the Arts and numerous arts organizations across the United States. Her workshops on ethics and cultural integrity have been featured at colleges and the National Storytelling Conference and the Society for Storytelling’s Gathering in Manchester, England. A winner of the Parents’ Choice Gold Award, Storytelling World Honors Award, the Audiofile Award and the American Library Association/Booklist Editor’s Choice Award for her recordings of traditional Native stories, she has been described as a “valuable resource for multicultural education.”
Laura Tohe
Laura Tohe is Diné (Navajo) and Professor of English, Arizona State University. She was born in Fort Defiance, AZ and is Tsenabahilnii (Sleepy Water People clan) and born for the Tódích´íinii (Bitter Water clan). She grew up near the Chuska Mountains on the eastern border of the Navajo Reservation and attended both boarding schools and public schools in Albuquerque. Laura Tohe has written and co-authored four books. Her most recent book, Tseyi, Deep in the Rockwon the 2007 Glyph award for Best Poetryand Best Book by Arizona Book Association and is listed as a Southwest Book of the Year 2005 by the Tucson Pima Library. She is the 2006 Dan Schilling Public Scholar for the Arizona Humanities Council. She writes essays, stories, and children’s plays that have appeared in the U.S., Canada and Europe. She wrote a commissioned libretto, Enemy Slayer, A Navajo Oratorio, for the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, which premiered in 2008. She is a member of the National Caucus Board of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Some of her work can be found here.