Episode 194: Indigenous History & Memory

This week, in honor of Indigenous People’s Day, scholars Rose Miron and Jean O'Brien discuss the power and importance of indigenous storytelling, activism, history, and memory; as well as Miron’s book Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory. This conversation originally took place May 19, 2024 and was recorded live at the American Writers Festival. AWM PODCAST NETWORK HOME About Indigenous Archival Activism: Who has the right to represent Native history? The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe's fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history. Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron's research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee. As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways. DR. ROSE MIRON is the Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University. Her research explores Indigenous public history and public memory within the Northeast and the Great Lakes regions. She holds a BA in History and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. JEAN O’BRIEN (citizen, White Earth Ojibwe Nation) is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished University Professor of History at University of Minnesota. O’Brien is a scholar of American Indian and Indigenous history. Her scholarship has been especially influential regarding New England’s American Indian peoples in relation to European colonial settlement. O’Brien’s works include: Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790, in which she demonstrates the persistence of Indians in the face of market economies that first commodified, and then slowly alienated their lands; Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, which investigates the local history writing of New England towns, which laid down the templates for American narratives of Indian disappearance; Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (with Lisa Blee) that analyzes the memory work surrounding monuments to the Indigenous leader who encountered the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and four edited volumes, most recently Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (with Daniel Heath Justice). She is a co-founder and past president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. She holds a Ph.D. from University of Chicago.