Resisting Exile in the 'Land of the Free': Indigenous Groundwork at Colonial Intersections

Indigenous Peoples represent holy places and sacred bonds to place in symbolic ways that constitute the borderlines of everyday knowledge, living, and experience in the present tense. Historical and ongoing colonization labors to encroach upon indigenous place-making, confiscate the properties in question, and exile Indigenous Peoples in an emotional and psychological deception represented as the "land of the free."

This panel concerned with indigenous ways of shaping and contesting place and space making will investigate how indigenous "groundwork" circulating in cultures of music, mass media communications, and everyday languages of decolonization and resistance mark boundaries that join and separate -- that write margins and mainstreams and create common ground. We might look, for instance, at how Indigenous Peoples are re writing globalization in ways that still claim the nation-state as an important and possibly democratic formation. We might explore how space can be understood in certain moments as colonized and in others as indigenized. We might interrogate how Natives and non Natives have negotiated various meanings for place in the commemoration of national memory -- in national parks, museums, and other sites of recollection and remembrance. Or, contemplating the dynamics of decolonization politics, we might investigate how culture functions as a crucial vehicle in processes that inscribe, embody, and contest place and space in Indigenous ways that expose the melancholy conditions of exile in the "land of the free."

CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposed panel for the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Groundwork: Space and Place in American Cultures
Washington, DC, November 3-6, 2005
Proposed panel title: "Resisting Exile in the 'Land of the Free':
Indigenous Groundwork at Colonial Intersections"
Deadline for submissions: Friday, January 21, 2004

By Monday, January 17, 2005, please submit a 250-word abstract and one page curriculum vita electronically to Tony Clark at tyeeme@uiuc.edu. You also may mail your submission to Tony Clark, American Indian Studies Program and the Native American House, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1206 West Nevada Street, MC 139, Urbana, Illinois 61801 3818.