As part of the Fictive Witnessseries, created by artists Tali Keren and Alex Strada,Native Studies scholar Shari Huhndorf will present Monuments, Memory, and the Art of Indigenous History. U.S. monuments, including those of U.S. presidents, create celebratory national narratives premised on Indigenous erasure, the obliteration from national memory of violent conquest in the past as well as ongoing Indigenous presence. After exploring this history, Shari Huhndorf will consider how Native artists revise official histories to counter Indigenous erasure and assert contemporary claims in the context of such recent events as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Contests over the meaning of the past, as these artworks reveal, are also contests over land and political power in the present. This lecture-performance will be followed by a talk-back.
Shari M. Huhndorf is Class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of two books, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (Cornell University Press, 2009), and a co-editor of three volumes, including Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (University of British Columbia Press, 2010). She won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to complete her current book project, Indigeneity and the Politics of Space: Gender, Geography, Culture, and she is also writing, with Roy Huhndorf, a community history of Indigenous land claims in Alaska.
ASL Interpreters or closed captioning will be available for all events.
