The Tyler Lecture Series Symposium 2023
Settler Schools, Indigenous Stories: Histories & Legacies of Native American Education
The Harrison Ruffin Tyler Department of History presents the 2023 Tyler Lecture Series Symposium
April 14, 2023
12:30-5pm
Blow Memorial Hall, room 201
First Session: 1pm-2:30pm
Dr. Buck Woodward, American University
Lecture: Brafferton Indian School Alumni: Diplomats, Warriors, and Translators at the Edge of Empires
Buck Woodard is a cultural anthropologist at American University, where he specializes in historical and applied research, ethnographic and ethnohistorical writing, and ethnological study of indigenous North America. His research areas include cosmology and ritual life, heritage tourism, kinship, material culture and political economy. Currently, Dr. Woodard is continuing fieldwork among Algonquians and Iroquoians in Oklahoma, New York, and Virginia. Data from this fieldwork contributed to an interdisciplinary working group and edited volume, Replanting Cultures: Community-Engaged Scholarship in Indian Country (2022). Previously, Dr. Woodard directed the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s American Indian Initiative (2008-16) and Historic Jamestowne’s Indigenous Chesapeake (2009-14). He is the co-author with Dr. Danielle Moretti-Langholtz of Building the Brafferton: The Founding, Funding, and Legacy of America’s Indian School, an illustrated volume released in 2019.
Dr. Brenda Child, University of Minnesota
Lecture: Boarding Schools and American Indian Dispossession
Brenda J. Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. In 2021, she was the University of Minnesota’s recipient of the President’s Community Engaged Scholar Award. She was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Child is the author of several award-winning books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Nebraska, 1998); Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (Penguin, 2012); and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (MHS Press, 2014). The latter won the American Indian Book Award. Her new book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World: Ojibwe People and Pandemics (2020). She also authored a bilingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow. It won a major prize, the American Indian Youth Literature Medal.
Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota and is part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000- member nation.
Second Session: 3:30pm-5pm
Sandra White Hawk, National Natve American Boarding School Healing Coalition
Lecture: Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation in Indian Child Welfare
Sandy White Hawk is a Sicangu Lakota adoptee from the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota. She is the founder and director of First Nations Repatriation Institute, which helps Indigenous people impacted by foster care or adoption to return home and reclaim their identity. Sandra is also the Director of Healing Programs at the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in Minneapolis and a consultant/trainer for the Tribal Training Certification Program at the University of Duluth, Minnesota. In addition, she has served on the Maine Wabanaki State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission and as an Honorary Witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools in Canada. Her own story has recently been published as A Child of the Indian Race: A Story of Return (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2022) and produced as a documentary film, Blood Memory: A Story of Removal and Return.
Dr. James Riding In, Arizona State University
Lecture: Surviving Board Schools and Ethnocide: A Pawnee Story of Accommodation, Resistance, and Cultural Renewal
Dr. James Riding In is a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, a Navy veteran, a graduate of Haskell Indian Junior College (now Haskell Indian Nations University), and Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, where he co-founded and directed the program in American Indian Studies. He has served as editor of the Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies, and he co-edited Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History, with Susan A. Miller. His own research spans dozens of articles and book chapters on topics including the repatriation of Indigenous remains, Pawnee history and culture, and racist stereotypes of Native Americans. He currently serves as a trustee on the Pawnee Nation College Board of Trustees.
Also, please keep an eye out for the Hungry Hungry Arrow Food Truck! They are an Indigenous owned and operated food truck and will be vending in the area!
This lecture series is made possible by a generous gift from the Harrison Ruffin Tyler family
