Native Pathways to Democracy: Collaborations, Histories, and Pedagogies of Place in the Greater Chicago Region

Abstract

Illinois teachers who register with their Illinois Educator Identifying Number (IEIN) will receive three continuing professional development units (CPDUs) for their full participation. Attendance at this session and the K–12 workshop will be required to receive full CPDU credit. 

Every academic conference meets on Indigenous land, and every conference theme—in this case “Pathways to Democracy”—benefits from being placed under a bit of pressure from both Indigenous histories and the active worlds of contemporary Native people.  In this roundtable session, we’ll consider Indigenous histories of the Chicago area, contemplate pedagogies of place, and learn about collaborative works of institutional-tribal partnership in rethinking archives, access, and the production of knowledge.  We’ll touch on legal claims, monuments, memorials, and museums, and histories of activism in literature and the arts.  This session is Part One of a two-part teaching workshop, and participants will link together scholarly and pedagogical work.

Chair: Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan
Deloria is Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context.  His first book, Playing Indian (1998), traced the tradition of white “Indian play” from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early twentieth century and the ways Native Americans challenged them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance.  He is the co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (with Neal Salisbury) and C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria (with Jerome Bernstein).  He is currently completing a project on American Indian visual arts of the mid-twentieth century, and coediting (with Beth Piatote) I Heart Nixon: Essays on the Indigenous Everyday.

Panelist: John N. Low, Associate Professor, Ohio State University
John N. Low received his Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and is an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. He earned a BA from Michigan State University, a second BA in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota, and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Professor Low previously served as Executive Director of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston, Illinois, and served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Indians of the Midwest Project at the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library, and the State of Ohio Cemetery Law Task Force. He has presented frequently at conferences including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)), American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). He continues to serve as a member of his tribes’ Traditions & Repatriation Committee.

Panelist: Aaron Luedtke

Panelist: Blaire Kristine Topash-Caldwell, Newberry Library

Panelist: Kelly E. Wisecup, Northwestern University