"Earthworks Rising" with Chadwick Allen

Description

Chadwick Allen, a professor in the Department of English and an adjunct professor in the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Washington, will give a talk on his new book, Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts.

The earthen mounds that rise up from the North American landscape appeared mysterious to European settlers who willfully misinterpreted their history and purpose. Against the idea of earthworks as ruins of some unknowable past, Indigenous peoples today continue to deepen and build new relationships with these ancestral sites, important centers of culture, religion, politics, and trade. In his new book, Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts, Chadwick Allen surveys contemporary artists, writers, and activists defining land and literature from an Indigenous perspective. He illuminates a legacy of Indigenous mounds as forms of "land-writing" and as conduits for connections across worlds and generations.

While colonial archaeology once claimed authority to interpret these sites, Allen shows how Indigenous artists and scientists are making new meaning through traditional and experimental practices.

This lecture is co-hosted by the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, the Department of English, the Department of the History of Art, the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship, the Johns Hopkins Archaeology Museum, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.