International Workshop

Indigenous North American Futurities: Archives, Source Codes, Beginnings

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June 17, 2019

Europa-Universität Flensburg

Room HEL 064

In June 2019, the Flensburg-based research project "Knowing Tomorrow: Twenty-First Century Native North American Archives of Futurity" (organized by Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes and assistant researcher Kristina Baudemann, and funded by the German Research Foundation DFG) will be launched with an opening event that brings together Native and non-Native scholars to discuss Indigenous temporality, futurity, epistemology, and representation. We cordially invite you to join us for our international workshop "Indigenous North American Futurities: Archives, Source Codes, Beginnings" at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. We welcome students, teachers, members of the EUF and of other universities and cordially extend our invitation to anyone interested in the Indigenous future. There will be no fee; please register by June 7, via native.futures@uni-flensburg.de.

Program

9:00                Welcome and Introduction

                        Birgit Däwes and Kristina Baudemann (Europa-Universität Flensburg)

9:15-10:30     Keynote Address

Grace Dillon (Portland State University), "Why Indigenous Futurisms Matter"

Chair and Response: Kristina Baudemann (EUF)

10:30-11:30    Literature, Land, Poetics

Sarah Henzi (University of Montréal),
"'You can change the world': Indigenous SF as Envisioning Shki-kiin, New Worlds"

Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne (Portland State University),
"Decolonial Indigenous Poetics and the Settler-Imperial City""

11:30-12:45    Lunch Break

12:45-13:45    Museums and Methodologies

Geneviève Susemihl (CAU Kiel), "Conserving Cultural Heritage for Future Generations: The Indigenous World Heritage Site of SGang Gwaay and Gwaii Haanas"

Birgit Däwes (EUF), "‘Ancient Resonance’: Native Museums as Archives of Temporal Sovereignty"

13:45-14:15    Concluding Round Table

Grace Dillon, Sarah Henzi, Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, Geneviève Susemihl, Kristina Baudemann and Birgit Däwes

Kindly supported by DFG (German Research Foundation) and Europa-Universität Flensburg.

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On the Project:

Knowing Tomorrow: Twenty-First Century Native North American Archives of Futurity

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Framing Indigenous people as members of bygone cultures is, unfortunately, not a thing of the past. From James Earle Fraser’s famous sculpture End of the Trail to James Cameron’s Avatar, Indigenous American cultures have long been displaced into nostalgic obsolescence. These images, while widespread, do not go unchallenged, and Indigenous cultural expressions abound with imaginaries of the future in textual narratives, digital media, visual arts, and public spaces, such as museums or websites. From pre-contact prophecies to contemporary Indigenous video games, writers, artists, and curators such as Gerald Vizenor, Elizabeth LaPensée, Skawennati, and Danis Goulet have contributed to a vast corpus of Indigenous futurity that defies colonial temporality, empowers alternative modes of knowledge, envisions sustainable societies and thus harbors highly relevant cultural capital for designs of a global future, especially in times of trans/national shifts, social division, and climate change. Dedicated to Indigenous North American engagements of temporality and the future in museums and digital environments, Knowing Tomorrow explores revisions of hegemonic historiography and literary canons and seeks to map broader understandings of temporality and futurity within American studies at large.

Organization and Contact:

Kristina Baudemann and Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes

Europa-Universität Flensburg

Auf dem Campus 1

24943 Flensburg

kristina.baudemann@uni-flensburg.de

birgit.daewes@uni-flensburg.de

uni-flensburg.de/nativefutures