Bailey Dann ’17
Thursday, November 21, 2024
HSSC S1325, 4:15 p.m.
“Where the Medicine Grows: Healing Generational Trauma through Land, Language, and Culture”
In this talk, Bailey Dann will weave together the stories of her family and her community's journey to reclaim what was nearly lost—our languages, our culture, our connection to the land. Grounded in both personal experience and community resilience, she'll explore how the deep roots of language, culture, and land offer pathways to healing generational trauma, particularly the lasting scars of boarding schools. From imposed silence to the resurgence of our voices, this presentation reveals how cultural revitalization, language growth, and land-based traditions are restoring strength where the medicine grows—in our teachings, our land, and our shared histories. Through reflections and stories, she'll offer insights into how Indigenous practices, knowledge systems, and tribal sovereignty guide us toward collective healing and enduring resilience.
Bailey J. Dann (Shoshone- Bannock) graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, in 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, Studio Art, and she additionally completed the Teacher Education Program. Following graduation, Bailey dedicated four years to teaching the Shoshoni language at Chief Tahgee Elementary Academy in Fort Hall, ID. Recognizing the pressing need for Shoshoni language curriculum development, Bailey pursued and earned her master's degree in Anthropology at Idaho State University in 2023 with a focus on linguistic anthropology. Today, Bailey serves as a Research and Education Specialist at her Tribes’ Language and Cultural Preservation Department, operating within the Office of Original Territories and Historical Research. Her responsibilities span diverse research and education projects, collaborating with state, federal, and nonprofit entities, including the National Park Service, National Forest Service, museums, libraries, and other educational institutions. Additionally, she contributes to the documentation of cultural and historic sites within the Tribes' original lands while coordinating educational initiatives and developing interpretive materials for Shoshone-Bannock tribal members, students, and the public. Bailey also works to develop Indigenous language curriculum tools and is establishing a certification process for Shoshone language teachers in her community. Furthermore, she serves as a board member and secretary on Chief Tahgee Elementary Academy's Board of Directors, reinforcing her dedication to education and community service. In her free time, Bailey enjoys weaving, sewing, beading, hide tanning, and oil painting.
A Conversation Around Post-Election Concerns and Issues
Friday, November 8, 2024
HSSC A2231, 4 – 5:30 p.m.
Join us for an open conversation where folks can exchange ideas and feelings without worrying about being attacked. Our goal, after exchanging thoughts, concerns, feelings, and fears, is that we move the conversation toward the values that hold us together in our roles as students, staff, faculty, and administrators who work together in a residential community.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Center for Prairie Studies, Data and Social Inquiry Lab (DASIL), Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation & Leadership, Peace and Conflict Studies, Rosenfield Program, and Writers@Grinnell.
Eric Zimmer
Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024
Join Eric Zimmer for a discussion about his book!
4 p.m., Humanities and Social Studies Center, Room A2231 (Auditorium) — Note change in location
Eric Zimmer will lead a book discussion about his book, Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement.
In 1857, the Meskwaki Nation purchased an eighty-acre parcel of land along the Iowa River. With that modest plot secured as a place to rest and rebuild after centuries of devastation and dispossession, the Meskwaki, or "Red Earth People," began to reclaim their homeland — an effort that Native nations continue to this day in what has recently come to be called the #Landback movement. Red Earth Nation explores the long history of #Landback through the Meskwaki Nation’s story, one of the oldest and clearest examples of direct-purchase Indigenous land reclamation in American history.
Public Talk: “Reclaiming the Indigenous Midwest: The Meskwaki Settlement as #Landback”
7 PM, Humanities and Social Studies Center, Room A2231 (Auditorium)
Eric Zimmer, is a historian from the Black Hills of South Dakota. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is currently pursuing a certificate in nonprofit leadership through the Harvard Kennedy School’s executive education program. Zimmer serves as the director of philanthropy at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation. There, he works with a wonderfully talented team to drive strategic philanthropy across his home region and help make the Black Hills thrive, forever.
From 2022 to 2023, Zimmer was the A.B. Hammond Visiting Assistant Professor of Western United States History at the University of Montana. There, he completed his most recent book, Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement, which is available from the University of Oklahoma Press. That project explores the remarkable story of the Meskwaki Nation, a Native American tribe in Iowa that bought back some of its homeland in 1857. The Meskwaki story offers context and insight for anyone interested in the modern movement to reclaim Indigenous lands in the US and elsewhere.
This event is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Office of Admission and Financial Aid, Community Partnerships, Planning and Research, the Rosenfield Program, and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Zimmer has committed to donating any royalties from the sale of Red Earth Nation, modest though they are, to the Meskwaki Nation, usually the Meskwaki Settlement School.
Accommodations are available for persons with disabilities as guests of the College. If you need an accommodation to attend an event that is open to the public, contact either the department sponsoring the event or the Office of Safety and Security (641-269-4600), and they will assist you with the accommodation that you need. Minors under the age 18 need to be accompanied by an adult. Grinnell College is not responsible for supervision of minors on campus.
Ned Blackhawk
Howard R. Lamar Professor of History, Yale University
Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024
Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101, 7 p.m.
“Resisting the Mythology of Indigenous Disappearance: Native Activists in the Early 20th-Century World”
Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is one of the most significant historians of his generation. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Harvard University Press, 2008). This book was recognized by the Organization of American Historians with the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book, in addition to many other awards.
Most recently, Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale UP, 2023), has garnered an impressive array of awards, including the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Blackhawk is also co-editor, with Ben Kiernan, Benjamin Madley, and Rebe Taylor, of Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern, and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One, which constitutes volume II of the three-volume The Cambridge World History of Genocide, (New York: Cambridge University Press, June 2023). He also co-edited Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the Legacy of Franz Boas, with Isaiah Lorado Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), and Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century, with Philip J. Deloria, Bryan Brayboy, K. Tsinina Lomawaima, Mark Trahant, Loren Ghiglion, and Douglas Medin (Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018). Indigenous Visions won the Biennial Book Prize for Best Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection from the Modernist Studies Association in 2019. Blackhawk is also the author of The Shoshone, a history of the Shoshone peoples and culture aimed at young adults, published in 2000.
Blackhawk earned a bachelor’s degree in history, with honors, from McGill University (1992); a master’s in history from UCLA (1994); and a doctorate in history from the University of Washington (1999). He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he won an outstanding mentor award, and currently teaches at Yale University, where he is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. Blackhawk’s talk is titled “Resisting the Mythology of Indigenous Disappearance: Native Activists in the Early 20th-Century World.” His visit is co-sponsored by the Dean’s office and the Center for the Humanities. The following sentences from The Rediscovery of America might prompt us to think about what we might gain, or lose, if we do not pay attention to Blackhawk’s recalibration of American history: “If our schools and universities are to remain vital civic institutions, we must create richer and more truthful accounts of the American Republic’s origins, expansion, and current form. Studying and teaching America’s Indigenous truths reveal anew the varied meanings of America” (8). Please join us at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 19, to learn more.
Accommodations are available for persons with disabilities as guests of the College. If you need an accommodation to attend an event that is open to the public, contact either the department sponsoring the event or the Office of Safety and Security (641-269-4600), and they will assist you with the accommodation that you need. Minors under the age 18 need to be accompanied by an adult. Grinnell College is not responsible for supervision of minors on campus.
2023-24 Events
Conversations in the Humanities
Kyle Whyte, PhD, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan
Friday, April 26, 2024
Humanities and Social Science Center, Room A2231, 4:30–6 p.m.
“Climate change. Indigenous knowledge. The liberal arts.”
To probe what the scientific facts of climate change might hold us to in terms of the ethics of membership in our communities and to being a citizen of the world.
Come join us for an interactive, 90-minute virtual conversation with Kyle Whyte, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan. A dinner discussion will follow.
Kyle Whyte is George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Whyte’s research addresses moral and political issues concerning climate policy and indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the anthropocene. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Whyte currently serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He has served as an author for the U.S. Global Change Research Program and is a former member of the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science in the U.S. Department of Interior and of two environmental justice work groups convened by past state governors of Michigan.
Whyte is involved with a number of organizations that advance Indigenous research and education methodologies and environmental justice, including the Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup, the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation, the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, Pesticide Action Network, and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence.
Whyte’s work has received the Bunyan Bryant Award for Academic Excellence from Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, Michigan State University’s Distinguished Partnership and Engaged Scholarship awards, and grants from the National Science Foundation.
Alumna Stephanie BadSoldier Snow ’03, Meskwaki Nation, will provide Whyte’s introduction and the event will be moderated by Steve Andrews, director for the Center for the Humanities and Andrew Graham, associate professor of chemistry. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and Environmental Studies.
Everyone is welcome. Accommodations are available for persons with disabilities as guests of the College. If you need an accommodation to attend an event that is open to the public, contact either the department sponsoring the event or the Office of Safety and Security (641-269-4600), and they will assist you with the accommodation that you need. Minors under the age 18 need to be accompanied by an adult. Grinnell College is not responsible for supervision of minors on campus.
Just Talk: A Trans Related Conversation on Legislation and the Law
Monday, April 8, 2024
Humanities and Social Studies Center (HSSC), Room A2231, 4:15 p.m.
Join us for a panel discussion about the areas of concern in the legal and legislative landscape regarding trans rights. Panelists include President Harris, Charlie O’Meara ’17, adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Kat Rohn ’08, executive director of OutFront Minnesota.
“Just talk” is just that — an opportunity to have informal conversation around a shared topic that changes from session to session. But it is also an imperative, a prompt to get going, less toward solutions than to recognizing and building a community, so that we can come to understand that we — you and I — are not alone. In that sense, “just talk” can also be an opportunity to share concerns about the social justice issues that impact our loved ones as they negotiate a world that is explicitly hostile to their becoming.
Charlie O'Meara ’17 (he/him) practices civil rights and impact litigation at a law firm in Minneapolis. He represents incarcerated people, tenants, students, employees, and consumers. In addition to practicing law, O'Meara is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. He also previously served as co-chair of the Minnesota Lavender Bar Association and has presented on and moderated several panels regarding trans rights. O'Meara received his BA in sociology from Grinnell College in 2017, and his JD from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2021.
Kat Rohn ’08 (they/she) is executive director for OutFront Minnesota — Minnesota’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Rohn joined the organization in 2022. Rohn also serves on the state council for LGBTQIA2S+ Minnesotans. Rohn has long been passionate about LGBTQ+ issues and engaged in making change from the workplace to local communities. Rohn lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with their partner and two kids.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Grinnell College Museum of Art, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, QERG (Queer Employee Resource Group), and the Rainbow Alumni.
Scholars’ Convocation:
Tammy Nyden
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Rosenfield Center (JRC) 101, 11 a.m.
Motherblame-stigma, Epistemic Injustice, and the Government’s Failure to Care
Nyden will examine the history of motherblame and how it operates to obscure government failures to provide a full continuum of non-carceral mental health care for children. Using the framework of epistemic injustice (how people are harmed as knowers), she examines motherblame-stigma as a social prejudice fueling various forms of epistemic oppressions, which scapegoat, gaslight, and exploit mothers, contributing to both the Children’s Mental Health Crisis and the Care Crisis.
Tammy Nyden is a professor of philosophy and affiliate faculty to the gender, women’s, and sexuality studies department at Grinnell College. She is also a co-creator and co-director of Mothers on the Frontline, a children’s mental health justice nonprofit organization. Her current scholarship traces how punitive excess, disguised as care, has deep roots in Enlightenment philosophies and expresses itself today in social and epistemic injustices targeting children, their caregivers, and families.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and Scholars’ Convocation Committee.
Everyone is welcome. Accommodations are available for persons with disabilities as guests of the College. If you need an accommodation to attend an event that is open to the public, contact either the department sponsoring the event or the Office of Safety (641-269-4600), and they will assist you. Minors under the age 18 need to be accompanied by an adult. Grinnell College is not responsible for supervision of minors on campus.
Scholars’ Convocation: Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.
Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024
Rosenfield Center, Room 101, 11 a.m.
An Epistemology of the Oppressed: Resisting and Flourishing under Epistemic Oppression
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and affiliate faculty to the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at Miami University (Ohio). They are also a senior research associate for the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Pohlhaus is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice and has published extensively on feminist epistemology, epistemic oppression, and feminist philosophy.
They say: “In ‘The Ethics of Uncle Tom’s Children’ Tommie Shelby notes that an ethics of the oppressed needs to attend to at least two aspects of living under conditions of oppression: first, resisting and overturning the unjust conditions that constitute oppression and second, sustaining a livable life despite injustice, so that one might, so to speak, live to fight another day. In this talk I consider whether the same is true for an epistemology of the oppressed. By ‘epistemology of the oppressed’ I mean a philosophical account of epistemic life from the perspective of those who are systematically subject to unjust infringements on their epistemic agency. Despite a growing amount of literature on epistemic injustice, it strikes me that much of this literature does not yet fully contribute to an epistemology of the oppressed (but instead is geared toward an epistemology of ‘how oppressors oppress and how oppressors could do better’). Of the literature that does contribute to an epistemology of the oppressed, most of it seems to contribute to the first aspect identified by Shelby, resisting and overturning unjust conditions. Is there also room for thinking about what it means to flourish, epistemically speaking, when one faces epistemic oppression? Or is all epistemic flourishing under such conditions reducible to epistemic resistance so that the conditions that impede one’s epistemic flourishing begin to be overturned?”
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and Scholars’ Convocation Committee.
Just Talk: A Space for Trans-Related Conversation
Monday, Nov. 27, 2023
Grinnell College Museum of Art, 4:15–6 p.m.
This event is open to all faculty, staff, and friends here at the College
Transitioning With Art: A Starting Point for Conversation
The Center for the Humanities is interested in starting a regular conversation around Trans-related issues in support of faculty, staff, and friends here at the College. Some of us are trans; some of us have kindred who are trans; others of us will wish to be allies; all of us, I hope, will want to know more about how best to understand the complex and often bewildering new relationships to which love binds us. “Just talk” is just that — an opportunity to have informal conversation around a shared topic that changes from session to session. But it is also an imperative, a prompt to get going, less toward solutions than to recognizing and building a community, so that we can come to understand that we — you and I — are not alone. In that sense, then, “just talk” can also be an opportunity to share concerns about the social justice issues that impact our loved ones as they negotiate a world that is explicitly hostile to their becoming.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Grinnell College Museum of Art, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and QERG (Queer Employee Resource Group).
Scholars’ Convocation: Jarvis Givens
Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023
Rosenfield Center, Room 101, 11 a.m.
Black Reconstructions: Archival Assembly and the History of African American Education
Professor Givens will explore why the violence of the archive is a pressing matter for the field of education research. He will also discuss his work on reconstructing the life-worlds of African American teachers and students during the 19th and 20th centuries, while focusing particularly on what he calls “archival assembly,” a methodological approach he employs to disrupt racialized gaps and silences in the historical record. This mode of black (historical) study is essential for achieving a more expansive vision of the educational past and futures.
Jarvis Givens is a professor of education and African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the author of School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness and Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, and he is also the co-founding director of the Black Teacher Archive.
This event is co-sponsored by the Mellon Humanities in Action Grant, the Center for the Humanities, and the Scholars’ Convocation Committee.
Past Events: 2022–23
Scholars’ Convocation: Makeba Lavan
Assistant Professor of English
Thursday, April 6, 2023
Rosenfield Center, Room 101, 11 a.m.
Attendees are requested to wear a mask during the presentation.
Miscegenation Nation: White Supremacy’s New Normal
There has been an increase in interracial relationships in film and television over the last 30 years, creating the appearance of a happily multicultural America. Lavan’s talk will discuss how these contemporary media representations relate to histories of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the United States preventing “interbreeding among the races” as well as contemporary realities of racial terror, racialized cultural appropriation, and the drive for true representation in media.
Lavan will be presenting with William Donaldson ’23, who has been contributing to research on the project.
Scholars’ Convocation: Eddie Glaude, Jr.
New York Times Bestselling Author and Chair of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies
Thursday, April 13, 2023
Rosenfield Center, Room 101, 7:30 p.m. (Note change in time)
Begin Again: James Baldwin and Our America
Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual, and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His most recent book, the New York Times bestseller, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own, takes a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy.
Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. He frequently appears in the media as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s complexities, vulnerabilities and hope into full view.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Office of the President, the Mellon Humanities in Action grant, and the Convocation Committee.
Events
College Mourns Professor Johanna Meehan
