"Who Owns the Past? Virginia Indians Today and Yesterday" lecture Apr. 15

Date: Apr. 15, 2008
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Weinstein Hall, Brown-Alley Room

Karenne Wood, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia and a Monacan Tribal Council member, will give a lecture on the representation of Virginia Indian histories, including issues of cultural patrimony as they relate to the past four centuries. The talk will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15 in Weinstein Hall's Brown-Alley Room. It is sponsored by the School of Arts & Sciences' anthropology, sociology and religion departments and the program  in American studies.

The lecture will address the ways in which Western theoretical constructs and language have marginalized Virginia Indian peoples and disengaged them from their past and the state-sanctioned racial policies that have affected Virginia's Indian tribes. Wood will examine indigenous ideas about collective memory and cultural persistence, as well as issues involving the repatriation of cultural artifacts and ancestral human remains to the descendants of Virginia's first people. Today, Virginia Indian tribal members are transforming public perceptions of their history through a program of their own making, in which they are no longer considered subjects of study but experts and teachers instead.

Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation and serves on the Monacan Tribal Council. She directs the Virginia Indian Heritage Program at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, holds an M.F.A. in poetry from George Mason University and is currently completing her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Jan French or Douglas Winiarski. 

Posted April 1, 2008