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Posted: 3/19/21

‘Native America and the Other Border’ Topic of TAMIU’s Virtual Lecture Series on Borders

 

Dr. Scott Manning Stevens
Dr. Scott Manning Stevens  

Native American nations and communities that exist on opposite sides of borders will be the focus of the next installment of Texas A&M International University’s (TAMIU) “Bringing the University to You” virtual lecture series Wednesday, March 24 at 7 p.m.

Dr. Scott Manning Stevens, associate professor of English and director of the Indigenous and Native American Studies program at Syracuse University, will present his lecture, titled, “Native America and the Other Border.”

Sponsored by Humanities Texas and hosted by TAMIU, Series lectures are free and open to the public. Participants may register here.

The “Bringing the University to You” Series lectures are designed to share with the TAMIU community and the public four sets of issues connected to Borders.

Issues discussed in the Series include the experiences of Mexican-American writers and their communities, the role of community and life experience in ethnic women’s writing, the problem of political borders for indigenous Americans whose cultures predate the modern sense of the border, and the experience of living on the Texas-México border and devoting a career to studying it.

In his lecture, Dr. Manning Stevens will discuss issues connected to Native American nations and communities that exist on opposite sides of borders, which have been drawn across their ancestral lands. He will focus on the U.S.-Canada border in the context of the annual ‘Border Crossing’ event in which Indigenous Americans gather and then walk across the border without documentation of any sort as a sign of their independence, tradition, and sense of belonging in a borderless North America.

His lecture will also consider reservations, themselves, as having borders, and the implications this has for the people living there.

At Syracuse University, Dr. Manning Stevens also holds courtesy appointments as associate professor of Art & Music History and associate professor of Religion. He is an expert in the representation of indigenous Americans in art, culture, and literature.

He received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and is a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation.

He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has co-edited and authored books including “Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and “Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians” (North Carolina University Press, 2015), and contributed to Art of the American West: the Haub Family Collection at Tacoma Art Museum” (Yale University Press, 2014).

Manning Stevens serves on the boards of various museums and organizations and has contributed to projects and exhibitions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Native Voices.” 

The last lecture in the Series features Dr. Jerry Thompson, TAMIU Regents Professor, who will lecture on “Fifty Years on the Texas-México Border” Thursday, April 8 at 7 p.m.

For additional information on the Series, please contact Dr. Adam Kozaczka, TAMIU assistant professor of Humanities, at adam.kozaczka@tamiu.edu or at 956.326.3300.

University office hours are 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Monday-Friday.