Join us for a special Native American Heritage Month event:
Narrative (Storytelling) as a Method of Indigenization
Mohonk Friends of the Indian Conferences and Indian Boarding School Policies of the 19th and 20th Centuries
A presentation by Olivia Tencer ’22
When: Tuesday, November 14, 6-7 pm
Where: Stevenson Library (browsing area)
Sponsored by Stevenson Library and the Dean of Inclusive Excellence.
Refreshments will be provided.
Join Olivia Tencer ‘22, Post-Baccalaureate Fellow with Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuk to learn about her research on the history of Indian boarding schools and the role of Mohonk Mountain House in supporting federal Indigenous child removal policies to further disrupt Native lifeways and dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land. Olivia will share how she uses Indigenous research methods like narrative or “storytelling”, one of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s 25 Decolonial Projects, to retell, rewrite, re-imagine, and re-narrate the history of Mohonk Mountain Houses’s Friends of the Indian Conferences and the profound influence of these conferences on Indian boarding school policies of the 19th and 20th centuries in the so called United States. What is the current narrative being shared at Mohonk? How do Indigenous research methodologies, specifically representation, re-narrate this history? How does narrative and storytelling help us as researchers to “Indigenize” colonial histories? Participants will look at various primary and secondary sources to further understand how narrative and storytelling help us as researchers to unpack history.
This talk was originally presented at the fall 2023 Rethinking Place conference at Bard College.