THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA | MARCH 6-7, 2025
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 multi-vocal interdisciplinary symposium organized by the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West 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.
It 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.
EVENT SCHEDULE
MARCH 6th 4:45 – 9:00 PM
Readings of Plays by Madeline Sayet and Beth Piatote at the E. Frank Gilson Lab Theatre, Old Science Building 640 Parrington Oval, OU School of Drama, Norman, OK
MARCH 7th 9:30 AM – 8:00 PM
DAYTIME: Symposium on Native American Belongings, Mary Eddy and Fred Jones Auditorium, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm Ave, Norman, OK
EVENING: Lecture and Reading by Angeline Boulley, Zarrow School of Social Work, 700 Elm Ave, Norman, OK
Contact us at emily.burns@ou.edu
These events are funded by the Initiative for the Humanities and Arts in Society Seed Grant, the Russell Center's Merkel Family Foundation Endowment, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the OU Department of Women's and Gender Studies.
Many thanks to Yve Chavez and Alicia Harris for their generous collaboration on this symposium.
