Canada Program Special Event

Public Keynote Address 

Welcome by Michael Szonyi, Harvard University

At a Remove: Re-storying Earthworks in Oklahoma 
Chadwick Allen, University of Washington

In this paper I give a brief overview of my recently published book, Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), and then discuss examples of how Indigenous nations in what is now the US state of Oklahoma are reengaging—and reimagining—ancient traditions of building large-scale earthworks. How do these new mounds occupy space and organize relations in the post-Removal era? And how do they make meaning, not only for local tribal citizens and the descendants of mound-building peoples forcibly removed to Oklahoma in the nineteenth century, but also for the predominantly non-Native publics that visit these contemporary sites as tourists? Finally, how are Indigenous nations framing the interpretation of newly built mounds in Oklahoma in relation to ancient mound sites in the Southeast and other homelands?

Chadwick Allen is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington Seattle, where he also serves as the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement. Author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, and Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts, he is a former editor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures and a past president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).