Many Nations Longhouse

Cherokee educator, writer and activist Ruth Muskrat Bronson is largely remembered as an Indian education reformist, executive secretary for the NCAI, and author of the 1944 publication, Indians Are People, Too. Additionally, Bronson also penned numerous editorials, commentaries and congressional testimonies that collectively evidence a tireless commitment to Indian communities. Before coming to her lifelong career of activism and advocacy, however, Bronson cut her teeth thinking about Indian history, federal policy and social justice in literary production composed as a student at the Oklahoma Institute of Technology and Mount Holyoke College.

This paper tells a brief story about how archival research has significantly—and in many ways quite surprisingly—impacted my own work, how I think about the politics of Cherokee literature and intellectual production, and how I understand the relationship between past generations of Native writers and our present moment. By way of a close reading of two short stories written by a young Ruth Muskrat while attending Oklahoma Institute of Technology (1913) and Mount Holyoke College (1922), I’ll consider how these and other texts speak across history to our contemporary moment with respect to the intersections between gender, jurisdiction, and justice in Indian Country. By way of conclusion, I’ll present some preliminary thoughts about how my archival engagement with them has forced me to reconsider how I think about, understand, and situate Bronson’s life and work in relationship to Cherokee history and to my own research.

Kirby Brown is an Assistant Professor of Native American literatures in the Department of English at the University of Oregon and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. His research interests include Native American literary production from the late 18th-century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, sovereignty/self-determination studies, nationhood/nationalism/citizenship studies and genre studies. 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.

Event is free and open to the public. Bring your own lunch.