Central Pennsylvania Native American & Indigenous Studies Symposium

The full schedule is available on the Symposium website. The deadline to register is Wednesday, April 10. Guest lecturers include tribal law scholar Lindsay Robertson, Chickasaw scholar and Deputy Secretary for First Nations in New York Elizabeth Rule, historian and Indian boarding school scholar Jacqueline Fear-Segal, and others. The event will also feature screenings of a curated selection of short films from the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the world’s largest Indigenous film and media festival. Numerous panels will cover topics including: Reverberations of Colonialism and Indigeneity in Pennsylvania; Native Americans and Tribal Law; Archival Interventions and Meditations; Indigenous Feminism and Visual Arts; Indigenous Peoples and Institutions; and Indigenous Histories in the Susquehanna River Valley. The Symposium will conclude with an evening with Frank Waln, an award-winning Lakota multi-genre music artist, public speaker and educator from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Waln is a devoted advocate for Native art who is a leading voice for fostering a deeper understanding of Indigenous history, culture and art. About the Center The Center for the Futures of Native Peoples at Dickinson College is a pioneering initiative dedicated to advancing the understanding and appreciation of the Indigenous boarding school experience, promoting the study of North American indigeneity, and fostering a robust national conversation on the past, present, and future of Native American issues. Our Center is uniquely positioned to lead in this endeavor, given Dickinson College's intimate and complicated history with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS), a major site of memory for Native Americans located near our campus. The CIIS, operating from 1879 to 1918, enrolled 7,800 students from across the United States, including Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, with the aim of assimilating and "civilizing" Indian children. As the flagship and model for all other off-reservation boarding schools across the US and Canada, the CIIS represented a tool of cultural violence intended to erase Indigenous futures and secure a singular, racially assimilated American nation. Our Center acknowledges the profound moral failing of Dickinson College's historical relationship with the CIIS, a relationship that included support for the school's activities and collaboration with its mission. We recognize the pernicious damage done by the CIIS to Indigenous peoples and their nations, and we are committed to reconciling with this history and facilitating opportunities to discuss the future of Native peoples—the very thing the CIIS and other federal boarding schools were designed to erase. The CFNP is made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.

Event Links

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2355951-0

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