HCAR Works-in-Progress Seminar: Shelby Johnson

Paper Title: “Transformational Flows in Anishinaabe Ecologies and Agokwe Futures”

HCAR welcomes you to join us for our October Works-in-Progress Seminar. Shelby Johnson will be presenting on a project that reflects some of her recent research into early Indigenous gender and sexuality studies – in this case, by speaking on an Anishinaabe guide named Ozaawindib, who was an agokwe. Assigned male by colonial writers but living as a woman in her community at Gaa-Miskwaawaakokaag (or Leech Lake), Ozaawindib’s agokwe personhood is routinely elided by American writers. In this work, Johnson seeks to trace pathways through and beyond settler reports of Ozaawindib with the writings of her Anishinaabe contemporary, Bamewawagezhikaquay, also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. She argues that Bamewawagezhikaquay’s retellings of aadizookaanag, or sacred origin stories in “Origin of the Robin” and “Corn Story,” index a mode of transformable embodiment that exists through lived responsibilities to local ecologies, which she often figures in the seasonal growth patterns of plants and in the fluid dynamics of waterways. In her talk, Johnson hopes to engage with her coordination of transformable embodiment and gendered responsibility to reread settler archives for agokwe roles that disrupt the smooth unfolding of a colonial epistemic norm.

If you would like to attend and have access to the electronic copy of Dr. Johnson’s paper, please email william-smith@utulsa.edu.

About Works-In-Progress Seminars

These seminars nurture a community of local and regional scholars by providing opportunities to share creative activity in an academically constructive environment. Each seminar will focus on pre-circulated drafts followed by a roundtable conversation among participants.