ONLINE: Indigenizing American History

press release The annual Merle Curti Lectures from the UW-Madison Department of History commemorate our late colleague Merle Curti, a pioneer in the practice of American intellectual and cultural history, as well as a beloved member of our department for nearly half a century until his death in 1996. The Curti Lectures constitute the centerpiece of the department’s academic year. For over forty years, highly distinguished historians have presented new or ongoing research to large audiences, comprised of faculty, students, and members of the larger Madison community. The series takes the form of three public lectures, presented on consecutive days, under an overarching thematic rubric.

Forty-First Annual Merle Curti Lecture Series, March 10-12, 2021, 4:00-5:15 PM: Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University

This Zoom webinar event requires attendees to register in advance. Upon registration, attendees will receive an invitation sent to their email address containing a unique link to join the webinar. This link is unique to each attendee and should not be shared. Registrants will be able to attend all three of the lectures using their unique webinar link. Register here.

Wednesday, March 10 | 4:00-5:15 PM CST | “The Stories We Tell: American Indians and American Historical Narratives”

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, as part of their Humanities Without Boundaries series.

The 2018 report Reclaiming Native Truth laid out a central and ongoing problem for Native Americans in a multi-racial American democracy. Across education, entertainment, and media, the voices of Native people are almost entirely missing: “Into this void, springs an antiquated or romanticized narrative, ripe with myths and misperceptions.” What are the big mythic stories that “we” Americans tell about Native people? How do historical narratives produce the ideological structures that take shape as a curious dynamic of Indian hypervisible/invisibility? Reclaiming Native Truth concludes with a call for new narratives. What kinds of stories might be possible, and how might they be told?

Thursday, March 11 | 4:00-5:15 PM CST | “Indigenous Declaration, Indigenous Constitution: Making the Indigenous States of America”

The dream state of Lenape, originating with the 1788 Fort Pitt treaty and wedged in between the western border of Pennsylvania and the eastern edge of Ohio, proved to be the first of several Indigenous counter-states. Their stories invite a rethinking of treaties, collective rights, constitutions, race formation, border control, militias, and perhaps even democracy itself. What can a step into the wild world of the counterfactual reveal about American narratives and the building blocks that might be assembled into new stories?

Friday, March 12 | 4:00-5:15 PM CST | “The Greater X: Indigenizing American History”

Elliott West and others have argued for a “Greater Reconstruction” that would expand the classic temporal, geographical, and political analyses used to mark Reconstruction, and so produce a continental narrative in which Native histories have import beyond the teleological margins. What kinds of stories might be told if historians took x to be any well-studied moment in United States history? And then sought to make such moments “greater” by reading them through Indigi-centric lenses? Might a collection of “greater” stories rebalance the old “big” stories, demanding new kinds of narratives and syntheses, and in doing so, address Reclaiming Native Truth’s call to drive culture change by paying serious attention to History?

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall 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. He is the Chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature.

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). Co-authored with Alexander Olson, American Studies: A User’s Guide (2017), offers a comprehensive treatment of the historiography and methodology of the field of American Studies. His most recent book is Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019), which reclaims a previously unknown Native artist while offering a new exploration of American Indian visual arts of the mid-twentieth century.

Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught for six years at the University of Colorado, and then at the University of Michigan from 2001 to 2017, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. At Michigan, he served as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Director of the Program in American Culture, and of the Native American Studies Program, and held the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Chair. His courses have included American Indian history, Environmental history, the American West, and American Studies methods, as well as Food Studies, Songwriting, and Big History.

Deloria is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he chairs the Repatriation Committee. He is former president of the American Studies Association, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions and will serve as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2022. Along with Erika Doss, he is the series editor of CultureAmerica, a University Press of Kansas series focused on American cultural history. He maintains ongoing academic engagements with scholars in Taiwan and Australia.