May Your Search for Knowledge Bring You Home: On Becoming a Cherokee Historian of Cherokee History

Join Kendall College for a lecture by Penn State University Associate Professor of Native American and American History Julie Reed, “May your search for knowledge bring you home: On Becoming a Cherokee Historian of Cherokee History.”

In this talk, Reed will discuss the evolution of her work as an ethnohistorian between the publication of her first book “Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare 1800-1907,” to her interdisciplinary work in caves in the former Cherokee homelands in the east alongside Cherokee and ally archaeologists and how the experience fundamentally altered how she thinks about her work. She will highlight these intellectual changes by sharing the methods and narrative approach used in her second book, “ᎦᏙᎯ, ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, ᎠᎴ ᎠᏂᎨᏯᏠ (Land, Language, and Women): A Cherokee and American Educational History,” and the ways her recent Mellon New Directions Award enables her to continue fostering new questions and interdisciplinary approaches to Cherokee history. Infused in this talk, Reed will share how she attempts to balance her roles as a Cherokee scholar in the academy with her responsibilities to community.

Reed is a historian on Native American history with an emphasis in Southeastern Indians and Cherokee history and American Education. Her first book “Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800-1907” examined the shift by the Cherokee people from a holistic system of care within a matrilineal clan system to the rise of nationally administered social services by the Cherokee Nation to individual citizens.

Her current project, “The Means of Education Shall Forever Be Encouraged in this Nation: A Cherokee and American Educational History,” reconsiders the idea that Cherokee educational history began with Christian missionaries, U.S. officials and Sequoyah’s invention of the syllabary, but rather has its origins in “older forms of knowledge transmission and a general belief among Cherokee people that every member of Cherokee society regardless of age or gender could learn from or teach every other member of society.”