2024-25 Events
Thursday, Sept 26-27th, 2024
The Legacy of Sacajawea: A Reconsideration
Join us for a series of events reconsidering the life and legacy of Sacajawea. On Thursday , Sept. 26th from 3:30-5 PM in the CTIHB Jewel Box, Dr. Wanda Pillow will deliver a lecture, “The Roots & Routes of Sacajawea and York: Writing toward an active presence of Indigeneity and Blackness in the 1804 Corps of Discovery Expedition.” At 7 PM that same day, in the Finch Lane Gallery, writer Debra Magpie Earling will read from her new and highly acclaimed novel, The Lost Journals of Sacajawea. The following day, Sept. 27th, from noon to 1 PM, in LNCO 2110, Dr. Pillow and Professor Earling will be in conversation about Sacajawea’s life, legacy, and how we might re-imagine the Corps of Discovery. Light refreshments will be served.
All events free and open to the public.
Debra Magpie Earling is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Montana where she teaches Fiction and Native American Studies. Earling’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Northeast Indian Quarterly, and many anthologies including Song of the Turtle (Old World/Ballantine); Contemporary Short Stories Celebrating Women; Circle of Women (Red River Books); Talking Leaves: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Short Stories (Delta). Perma Red (Blue Hen Books 2002), her first novel, received the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West in 2003, the Mountain and Plains Bookseller Association Award, WWA’s Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award, and the American Book Award. It is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and was chosen by Barnes & Noble as part of its Discover Great New Writers series. The Lost Journals of Sacajawea, her newest book, won the Montana Book Award.
Dr. Wanda Pillow is a feminist interdisciplinary scholar with training in the social sciences and the humanities. Professor Pillow’s research and teaching focus on intersectional studies of colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality with emphases in social policy, feminist theory, feminist methodology, and cultural history. Pillow’s publications include critical interventions in theory and methodology; socio-historical analysis of race/gender/sexuality and American identity; Title IX and pregnant/parenting students; and works focused on Sacajawea and York of the U.S. 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition. A daughter of Detroit by way of Arkansas, Pillow lives in Salt Lake City.
This event is sponsored in part by the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English.
Thursday, November 7th, 7-8 PM, NHMU
Bestselling author John Vaillant will be discussing his newest book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, and life in the Pyrocene in the American West.
On Friday, November 8th, from 11:30 to 1 PM, John Vaillant will be in conversation with students in LNCO 2110. Light refreshments will be served.
All events are free and open to the public.
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Knopf, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, was a bestseller and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Canada). Fire Weather (Knopf, 2023), a #1 bestseller in Canada, won the UK's Baillie Gifford Prize, a global award for English language non-fiction, and was a finalist for National Book Award and the Canadian Writers‘ Trust Nonfiction Prize. It was named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The New York Times, among many other prominent publications in Europe and North America. Feature film rights have been optioned by Vendôme Pictures, which won an Academy Award for CODA in 2022.
This event is sponsored in part by the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy, the Natural History Museum, and the Stegner Center
January 17-18, 2025
Re-Imagining Native American Representation in the American Western
Join the AWC for a two-day film festival! On Friday afternoon, January 17th, at 12 - 1 pm we'll be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Frankel and Dr. Andrew Nelson at ART 271. In the evening, we will be screening The Searchers, one of Hollywoods's most influential Westerns, with an introduction and post-show Q&A led by author Glenn Frankel, author of The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend. On Saturday afternoon, January 18th, we'll screen the documentary Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian, followed by a public Q&A to discuss the ways that Native American representation in narratives about the American West has and hasn't changed. Both events are free and open to the public.
Thursday, February 27th, 2025, 3:30-5 PM, LNCO 2110
Come learn about the fascinating life of Sanora Babb, the silenced author of one of the first great American Dust Bowl novels, whose own oral history research influenced (and was possibly stolen by) John Steinbeck. Poet and biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle, author of Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, will discuss Babb’s life, work, andthe importance of who gets to tell American stories. This event is free and open to the public.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an Emerita Poet Laureate of Sonoma County and a faculty member at UC Davis. She has authored two biographies: Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, forthcoming). Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was recently published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle writes a weekly blog called Finding Lost Voices, which revives the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered and serves as the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.
Thursday, April 3rd, 2025, 3:30-5 PM, LNCO 2110
Join us for two events with the acclaimed historian Dr. Claudio Saunt. On Thursday, April 3rd, from 3:30-5 PM in LNCO 2110, Dr. Saunt will discuss his newest book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, which documents the deportation of the Five Tribes from the Southeast into Oklahoma. The following day, April 4th, from noon-1 PM in Digital Matters, Dr. Saunt will present his accompanying digital history project, “The Land Beneath Our Feet,” which maps Cherokee land and the loss of Cherokee family homes. Light refreshments will be served.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Dr. Claudio Saunt is Richard B. Russell Professor in American History, Regents' Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of four books, including West of the Revolution (2014), Black, White, and Indian (2005), and A New Order of Things (1999). His most recent book, Unworthy Republic (2020), was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has developed several online projects, including the Invasion of America and, with Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana. In 2018, he received an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to produce an online, interactive time-lapse map of the African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1800. Supported by a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship, his current project, "The Land Beneath Our Feet," maps in depth and detail the Cherokee families who lost their homes in the 1830s, creating a virtual representation of the Cherokee Nation just before the United States drove its sixteen thousand citizens off their farms and across the Mississippi River.
This event is sponsored in part by the Stegner Center.