The Newberry Library Seminar on Women and Gender presents Indian Women, Agrarian Villages, and Landscapes of Violence by Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith, September 23, 3:00-5:00 at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton Street, Chicago.
This paper examines the agrarian village world created by Indian women in the Ohio River valley, villages that have been conspicuously invisible in the historical record. In 1791, they posed a serious barrier to U.S. expansion and President Washington ordered a U.S. army attack on these villages. The villages and fields were burned and ninety Indian women and children were kidnapped and imprisoned at Fort Washington (Cincinnati). The federal government destabilized this agrarian landscape, dismissed all Indians as warlike, and consigned this agrarian landscape to invisibility. This paper explores both the agrarian world created by Indian women and exposes the federal actions that destroyed this world.
Commentator: Brenda Child, University of Minnesota
All papers are pre-circulated electronically to those who plan to attend the seminar in person. For a copy of the paper, e-mail Carmen Jaramillo at jaramilloc@newberry.org. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
Co-sponsored by the History Departments of DePaul University, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago.