Powerful Stories
Indigenous and Refugee Histories of Dispossession and Displacement
14-15 March 2024
To celebrate the visit of Dartmouth College’s Samson Occam Professor N. Bruce Duthu, an enrolled tribal member of the United Houma Nation of Louisiana, the Discipline of History in the School of Humanities, the Law School, and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre for Humanity through Time are hosting a series of events exploring the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural power of storytelling.
Film screening
Professor Duthu is an internationally acclaimed scholar of Native American law and policy and the author of American Indians and the Law and Shadow Nations. He also co-produced the Emmy-Award winning documentary film, Dawnland. For decades, child welfare authorities have been removing Native American children from their homes to “save them from being Indian.” In Maine, the first official Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States begins a historic investigation. Dawnland goes behind-the-scenes as this historic body grapples with difficult truths, redefines reconciliation, and charts a new course for state and tribal relations. Dawnland aired on Independent Lens on PBS in November 2018 and 2021, reaching more than two million viewers. The film won a national Emmy Award for Outstanding Research in 2018 and made the American Library Association’s list of 2020 Notable Videos for Adults.
Workshop
Professor Duthu will also preside over a workshop that brings together scholars from a variety of fields with community organisations and members to discuss the intersections of Indigenous and refugee experiences of displacement and how storytelling has, is, and will be used for the cause of Indigenous and refugee sovereignty and self-determination. The workshop will address the ways and means by which different peoples have shared and continue to share their stories, reclaimed their own histories, and/or uncovered different kinds of self-representations in their current work or research. Indigenous peoples and refugees share and have shared an experience of exile, of dispossession. How have they narrated and preserved those stories? What kind of work have those stories done, and what do they do now? Participants will help expand our collective understanding of what constitutes self-representations or self-histories, amid ongoing settler colonial violence, and how we might ethically and collaboratively work toward supporting the telling of those stories. The workshop will also include keynotes by Professor Chelsea Watego and Dr. Jordana Silverstein, and a special screening of Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation film “We Were Just Little Boys.”
Masterclass
Finally, Professor Duthu will conduct a masterclass on "Narratives of Indigenous and Settler Colonial Relations," that is designed to appeal to a multi- and inter-disciplinary group of students and scholars at ECR, HDR, Hons, and Senior Undergraduate level.
