Please join us on April 4 from 12:00pm – 1:30pm for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims by Shari Huhndorf, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Professor Shari Huhndorf will be joined in conversation with Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley, and Luanne Redeye, Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley, will moderate.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and the Department of Ethnic Studies, the History of Art Department, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues.
About the Book
Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely neglected, even in Native organizing, as a pressing concern associated with the status of Indigenous people in settler nation-states. The cultural works discussed in this book provide an urgent Indigenous feminist rethinking of Native politics that exposes the innate gendered dimensions of ongoing settler colonialism. They insist that Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights must entail gender justice for Native women.
Panelists
Shari Huhndorf is Class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of three books, Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims (UC Press, 2024), Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (Cornell University Press, 2009), and a co-editor of three volumes, including Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (University of British Columbia Press, 2010), winner of the Canadian Women’s Studies Association Prize for Outstanding Scholarship. She is currently completing a community history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), the largest Indigenous land claims settlement in U.S. history.
Lauren Kroiz is an Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on art and modernism in the United States during the twentieth century. She has taught a range of topics in the history of American art, photography, material culture, and modernism, including courses on avant-gardism, race and representation, thing theory, technologies of imaging, meanings of medium, and globalization. Kroiz is the author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era (University of California Press, 2018) and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (University of California Press, 2012).
Luanne Redeye is an Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. As a portrait and figurative artist, she works at the intersection of autobiography and community. Luanne grew up on the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York. It is from here where she draws connections to land, kinship, and culture in her artwork, which gives her pieces a strong personal and emotional component. Whether her art touches on the native experience, identity, or resiliency, Luanne’s work is always created through a native lens sharing her experiences, knowledge, and perspective of navigating a modern world as a native woman.
Bernadette Perez is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She focuses particularly on the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her work is situated at the intersection of multiple subfields of history, from race and environment to labor, migration, and colonialism. In other words, she studies empire and capitalism in action. Migrant sugar beet workers are at the heart of her current work. In her manuscript, she follows corporate sugar into southeastern Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century and trace its efforts to hold diverse working communities within a highly unequal and hierarchical land and labor regime for the better part of a century. In doing so, she unearths the long and entangled histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and white peoples in a space structured by U.S. expansion, Indian removal, and anti-Blackness.