Conference Planners and Co-Sponsors

Kirby Brown (Cherokee Nation) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.  His primary research and teaching areas include Native writing from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, and nation/nationalism and sovereignty/self-determination studies. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of citizenship and belonging in ethnic American writing and the relationships between narrative form, cultural representation, public policy and the law.

His current research project, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Early Twentieth Century Cherokee Writing, examines how four Cherokee writers variously remembered, imagined and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the period between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and tribal reorganization in the early 1970s. Often read as an intellectually inactive and politically insignificant “dark age” in Cherokee history, he recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary discussions about sovereignty, self-determination, citizenship and belonging in Native Studies today.

Burke Hendrix is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.  He is the descendent of non-indigenous settlers in the Coast Range not far from Eugene.  His research and teaching focus on normative political theory, global justice, and the history of political thought.  He is especially interested in theories of political authority, state territoriality, historical injustice, and the ethics of political action as they concern Native peoples in the United States and Canada.

He is the author of Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims (2008).  He is currently completing a book entitled Strategies of Justice: Political Theory, Contextual Fairness, and Indigenous Political Action, which examines the contexts in which indigenous politics takes place and the kinds of strategies that might be adopted to increase the scope for indigenous self-rule.

Co-Sponsors

The conference is co-sponsored by multiple University of Oregon departments and programs.  We thank the following for their generous support:

Office of the Provost – College of Arts and Science – Oregon Humanities Center – Museum of Natural and Cultural History – Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics – Collins Endowment For the Humanities – Department of English – Department of Political Science – Department of History – Department of Philosophy – Department of Ethnic Studies – Tribal Climate Change Project – Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center