This year's William Hammond Lecture on the American Tradition will feature Mishuana Goeman, Chair of the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo and President of the American Studies Association. Her 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 domesticates 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.
This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. Hosted by the Humanities Institute and the American Indian Studies Program, part of the Center for Ethnic Studies.