THOUGHT

PROVOKING

Book a Distinguished Lecturer from the Organization of American Historians for your next event.

Woman speaking at podium

VMI Photo by - H. Lockwood McLaughlin

 

 

CELEBRATING WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

The OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program features 175 speakers specializing in women's history and women's activism.
Get to know them and their work: Women's History Speakers

OAH Distinguished Lecturers can be scheduled virtually or in-person to headline special events and to bring context to today's most important issues.

 

This was one of the best lecturers and presentations that I have had for my series, now in its 12th season. Dr. William Carrigan took an important but complicated topic and made it easy to comprehend its meaning and significance. Very engaging to the audience and enthusiastic about the questions!

Rebecca Urban, G.A.R. Hall Civil War Lecture Series - Peninsula Foundation

Featured Lecturer

Portrait of lecturer

Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Ph.D.

Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Ph.D. (Chickasaw) serves the University of Oklahoma as a Professor of Native American Studies. She has received significant recognition for her scholarship, winning the American Book Award for Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females. In addition, she is the co-editor of The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations with Amy Lonetree. Cobb-Greetham is at work on a book she began as a 2021-2022 Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Bright, Golden Haze: Oklahoma/Indian Identity in Myth and Memory, is a collection of interrelated essays interrogating Oklahoma/Indian...
Read More

Featured Lecture

"Dinosaurs to the left, Indians to the Right:" Decolonizing and Indigenizing Museums

Native Americans have a tortured relationship with museums. By using a historically unquestioned authority to take Native objects and remains and to define who and what Native Americans are, museums have, in many ways, trapped Native Americans behind their glassed-in cases, rendering vital, contemporary Native voices silent, dynamic Native cultures invisible. The relationship between Native American and Indigenous communities and mainstream museums has changed significantly in recent decades as a result of Native involvement in new museum theory and practice. These changes include the sharing of curatorial ideas, engagement in collaborative partnerships, and efforts to integrate Indigenous knowledges and perspectives.
This lecture considers: (1) the ways in which mainstream museums have historically served as colonizing forces through the representation of Native peoples and the use of western curatorial methodologies; (2) the ways in which such museums can "decolonize" and "indigenize" in an effort to promote healing and understanding; and (3) the ways in which Tribal cultural centers and museums use, challenge, and reimagine long-standing curatorial practices while themselves wrestling with questions of representation, truth-telling, and the complexities of shared histories and memories. Cobb-Greetham uses three sites as case studies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; the First American Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Oklahoma.

"For Native Americans, museums have often been used as tools of colonization and dispossession. In recent decades, Native American curators and collaborators have used museums into tools of self-definition and cultural sovereignty."