Registration information: all three lectures will be held in person and also streamed virtually, via Zoom webinar. Please register separately for each lecture (see below).
In this series of three lectures, Kelly Wisecup examines how Indigenous peoples made and used the page to address structures of dispossession. The backbone for these three lectures is Pokagon Band of Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon’s Red Man’s Greeting (alt. title Red Man’s Rebuke), which was first printed on sheets of birchbark in 1893. (In selecting this title, Pokagon followed uses of “red man” by other Indigenous writers as a term of critique and political appeal.) Framed as an exceptional book both in 1893 and in the present, the Greeting/Rebuke actually participated in a larger Indigenous practice of making pages and books out of birchbark. These lectures tell an Indigenous history of the page by focusing on birchbark bookmaking in the late 19th and early 20th century, when these practices intersected with Indigenous peoples’ experiences of deforestation and with U.S. settlers’ responses to their own demand for and destruction of forests to make woodpulp paper.
Over the past thirty years, studies of Indigenous print cultures and literacies have shown how Indigenous peoples adapted their writing systems, aesthetics, and material forms to the codex and the alphabet, as well as how American literature reflects settler writers’ interactions with Indigenous writing systems. Building on this scholarship, Wisecup turns to the page and its relationships with trees as a significant yet overlooked element in both Indigenous book histories and in the field of bibliography writ large. The lectures take the page as a site for studying relationships among books, periodicals, papermaking, and environmental degradation. Bringing Indigenous Studies and bibliographical methods into closer conversation is necessary to understanding Indigenous experiments with bookmaking and the myriad relationships with trees that these experiments expressed.
