Free Hybrid Summer Lecture Series: Indigenous Histories and Material Culture
June 26, 2025, 7:00 pm - July 17, 2025, 8:00 pm
Deerfield Community Center 16 Memorial Street Deerfield, MA 01342 + Google Map
Category: Lectures Virtual & Hybrid
Apess, William (1798–1839). A Son of a Forest. 1831. The Library of Congress.
The 2025 Summer Lecture Series will take place both in person at the Deerfield Community Center and via Zoom from 7–8 p.m. (ET) on the following Thursdays: June 26, July 10, and July 17.
Lectures are free, but registration is required. There are two options for registration: virtual or in-person. In-person attendance is at the Deerfield Community Center (16 Memorial St, Deerfield, MA 01342).
Virtual Registration:
Sign up using the button above to receive Zoom links for all three lectures.
In-Person Registration:
If you are registering to attend in person at the Deerfield Community Center, sign up using the buttons below.
Lecture 1 (June 26): “The Return of William Apess: Resurrecting the Life and Legacy of a Nineteenth-Century Pequot Author and Activist” with Dr. Drew Lopenzina.
Dr. Drew Lopenzina is Professor of Early American and Native American literatures at Old Dominion University whose work interrogates the intersections between settler-colonial and Indigenous cultures in the Northeast. He is interested in formations of race and how race and culture are memorialized in public spaces. Dr. Lopenzina is the author of Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period (SUNY Press 2012) and The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature (Routledge Press 2021) and Through an Indian’s Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press 2017). He is currently working on a critical edition of William Apess’s 1829 memoir, A Son of the Forest, which is due to come out with Broadview Press in summer of 2025.
Lecture 2 (July 10): “Carrying the Fire: Cherokee Women’s Textile Diplomacy” with Dr. Patricia Dawson (Cherokee Nation)
Dr. Patricia Dawson (Cherokee Nation) teaches and researches Native American history and material culture. Dr. Dawson’s current manuscript project examines Cherokee clothing as a tool of diplomacy, symbol of identity, and weapon of resistance against Euro-American encroachment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the early nineteenth century, Cherokee women transformed their economy through cotton agriculture and cloth production, and they were at the center of the Nation’s resistance to Removal through material culture diplomacy. Dawson is also working with family members to edit and publish A History of the Cherokee Nation by Rachel Caroline Eaton, who is believed to be the first Native American woman to earn a PhD. The book is set to be published in Fall 2025 by University of Oklahoma Press, which originally rejected the book in 1935 for being “too pro-Cherokee.” When not teaching or researching, Dawson can often be found attempting a variety of textile projects, and she is firm believer in fostering community through crafternoons.
Lecture 3 (July 17): “Native New England and the Impact of Slavery” with Dr. Margaret Ellen Newell
Dr. Margaret Ellen Newell is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University. Her most recent book, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press), won the 2016 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for the best book on the history of race relations in the U.S., and the 2016 Peter Gomes Memorial Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). Recent articles include: “’The Rising of the Indians’; Or, the Native American Revolution of (16)’76,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 80 (April 2023); “Sarah Chauqum: Eighteenth Century Rhode Island and Connecticut,” in As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, ed. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri Snyder (Cambridge University Press, 2020); “In the Borderlands of Race and Freedom (and Genre): Embedded Indian and African Slave Testimony in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in French and British America, 1700–1848 ed. Sophie White and Trevor Burnard (Routledge, 2020). Presently she is the Mary Ball Washington Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin, and Principal Investigator for a multiyear Mellon-funded research project on African American and Native American citizenship, 1780–1950.