This year's William Hammond Lecture on the American Tradition will feature Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Indigenous Studies and the Chair of the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo and President of the American Studies Association. Her talk is titled "Iconographies of Place in Treaty Art." A reception will follow.
This talk explores the iconography of treaties in contemporary art practices in the context of one hundred years of the Indian Citizenship Act. The Act itself centers on the human and the closing of the co-constitutive power of the US and Canadian territorial sovereignty. The act attempts to domesticate Indians—and their lands-- as citizens under the shroud of American Legal territorial sovereignty, moving Indigenous lands to the purview of the secretary of the Interior in the US and under the patriarchy of the Indian Act in Canada. In contrast to this moment, artists have long depicted an alternative vision of the relationship between belonging and land that exceeds settler borders and their colonial premises.
In this talk, Dr. Goeman will examine examples of the reconfiguration of forms of territorial sovereignty through art practices that rethink land and relationships not only between landed points but also in relation to other humans and more-than-humans. How do contemporary art practices create not only a sense of belonging but also a sense of reciprocity and responsibility? How is a “sea to shining sea” affective regime of belonging disrupted by the visual impact of Indigenous artists who address colonization and forms of settler structures of belonging that are often gendered practices? What might we gain from examining public art and other built environments where the subtlety of assertion of treaty rights, existing before the 1924 act, is not so apparent to a North American public but is the iconography that creates a sense of belonging from those in reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Nations? How does expressive citizenship creatively refuse a hundred years of settler citizenship and disrupt colonial geographies based on patriarchal property logics?