Belonging: Native American Art in Settler Contexts | Symposium

Symposium | March 6 & 7, 2025
Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West
University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Please pre-register here: tinyurl.com/zzzd99xy

The term Belonging increasingly gains currency in discussions of Native American art and material culture in museums, art history, and Native American and Indigenous studies. This symposium explores how the concept points to agency, animacy, and fundamentally distinctive epistemological systems. While in many settler contexts, belonging signifies possession, parallelling displacement and genocide of Native Americans, in many Indigenous knowledge systems, the term speaks to the relationality of belonging to and within a community.

This multivocal interdisciplinary symposium analyzes Belongings and celebrates creative practices in which Native American writers and makers have engaged with the appropriation and display of Native American Belongings in museum spaces. With community members, artists, art historians, and curators, the discussions consider how Belongings might be defined and how creative and academic writing, art, and oral histories grapple with settler colonial appropriation of Belongings.

Schedule of Events

Thursday, March 6, 2025

• Where: Gilson Lab Theatre, OU School of Drama, Old Science Hall, 2nd Floor, 640 Parrington Oval | Map
  Theater and Belongings in Museums Old Science Hall
  Readings facilitated by Alissa Branch, E. Frank Gilson Lab Theatre Associate Professor of Drama
• 4:45 pm: Welcome: Emily C. Burns, PhD, Director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West; and Alissa Branch, OU Associate Professor of Drama
• 5:00 pm: Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet (Mohegan)
  Read by Margaret Stratton (Cherokee Nation), OU ’26
• 6:00 pm: Dinner, catered by Junebug Catering
  Tables of beadwork by members of the Gamma Delta Pi sorority and Indigenous Forms Club
• 7:00 pm: Antíkoni, by Beth Piatote (Nez Perce)
  Read by Native American community members
• 8:15 – 9:00 pm: Talkback with readers and playwrights

Friday, March 7, 2025

• 8:45 ‐ 9:15 am: Informal breakfast, Russell Center, 409 W. Boyd Street, Norman, OK | map
• Friday sessions, location: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Mary Eddy and Fred Jones Jr. Auditorium, 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, OK | map
• Tables of beadwork by members of the Gamma Delta Pi sorority and Indigenous Forms Club throughout the day
• 9:30 – 9:45 am: Welcome and Introductory Remarks by Emily C. Burns, PhD, Director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West
• 9:45 – 11:45 am: Defining Belongings (15-minute talks followed by discussion)
  Chaired by Yve Chavez, PhD (Gabrieleno Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians), Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Oklahoma, and Clementine Bordeaux, PhD (Sicangu/Oglala Lakota), UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, University of California–Riverside;
• Mary Deleary, PhD (Deshkan Ziibiing [Chippewas of the Thames]), Director, IAIA Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts;
  Elizabeth Hutchinson, PhD, Associate Professor and co-chair of Art History/Faculty Director, Digital Humanities Center, Barnard College/Columbia University;
  Carolyn Smith, PhD (Karuk), Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California–Berkeley
• 12:00 – 1:00 pm: Lunch at Russell Center, catered by Thawan Thai
  Tables of beadwork by members of the Gamma Delta Pi sorority and Indigenous Forms Club
• 1:15 – 2:15 pm: Creative Writing and Native American Belongings in Museums
  Chaired by Carolyn Dunn, Associate Professor of Theater and Dance at California State University–Los Angeles;
  Beth Piatote, PhD (Nez Perce), Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley;
  Madeline Sayet (Mohegan), Clinical Associate Professor, with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in the English Department, Arizona State University and Executive Director, Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program
• 2:20 – 3:20 pm: Making and Belonging (10-minute talks followed by discussion with artists)
  Chaired by Annika Johnson, PhD, Curator of Native American Art, Joslyn Museum;
  Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation/Delaware Tribe);
  John Isaiah Pepion (Blackfeet Tribe (Piikani))
• 3:20-3:40 pm: Coffee Break in Cup O’Jones, Fred Jones Jr. Museum
• 3:45-4:45 pm: Niitsitapi Belonging(s) in Portraits by Winold Reiss
  (10-minute talks followed by discussion)
  Chaired by Alicia Harris, PhD (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes), Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Oklahoma;
  Cheryle “Cookie” Cobell Zwang (Amskapi Piikani [Blackfeet Tribe]), Chair of the Tribal Relations Committee, Glacier National Park Conservancy;
  Marjie Crop Eared Wolf (Káínai/Secwépemc), Multidisciplinary Artist;
  Heather Caverhill, PhD, University of Alberta
• 5:15 pm: Reception and dinner, catered by Junebug Catering at Zarrow Community Hall, Zarrow School of Social Work, 700 Elm Avenue, Norman, OK | map
  Tables of beadwork by members of the Gamma Delta Pi sorority and Indigenous Forms Club
• 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. Keynote Lecture and reading by author. Generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art

Please pre-register here: tinyurl.com/zzzd99xy

Abstracts of Plays

Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet

Madeline Sayet’s one-person play is a celebration of language and an investigation into the impulses that divide and connect us as people. The play follows Achokayis as she travels to England to pursue a degree in Shakespeare, grappling with the question of what it means to remain or leave her own home at Mohegan, as the Brexit vote threatens to disengage the United Kingdom from the wider world. Moving between nations that have failed to reckon with their ongoing roles in colonialism, she finds comfort in the journeys of her Mohegan ancestors who traveled to England in the 1700s to help her people. Achokayis’s transformation journey leaves us with the question, what does it mean to belong in an increasingly globalized world?

Antíkoni by Beth Piatote

In this timely retelling of a Greek classic, a Nez Perce family is caught between the pressures of the outside world and adherence to the ancient ways of caring for the dead. Set in the near future, Antíkoni defends eternal truths while Kreon rides the waves of changing politics, while Ismene and Haemon are caught in the middle. A Chorus of Aunties offers raucous and wise traditional stories as commentary and guidance, affirming the power of storytelling across time. Deeply rooted in Native cosmologies and kinships, this adaptation combines the power of two ancient traditions to affirm and sustain a vision of justice in a deeply unjust world.

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Funded by the Initiative for the Humanities and Arts in Society Seed Grant, the Russell Center’s Merkel Family Foundation Endowment, and the Terra Foundation for American Art Convening Grant