Elizabeth Cook Lynn (Crow Creek Lakota scholar and author) says that a nation which does not tell its own story cannot be said to be a nation at all. But how do you claim your story when all you have are the fragments left after the triple genocides of missionization, Gold Rush and land grab?
Join the Office of the Provost, the Women's Resource Center and the Program for Native American Studies in Room 103 Oglebay Hall, Oct. 3 at 6:30 p.m. to hear Deborah Miranda discuss the methodology and research behind constructing a multi-genre mosaic for her tribe, The Esselen Nation, out of the shards of California Indian history.
Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Her mixed-genre book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday 2013), received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award, and has been widely adopted for use in Native American Studies and Creative Writing programs both in the U.S. and internationally. She is also the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and the forthcoming An Altar for Broken Things. She is co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, and wrote the afterword for A Generous Spirit: Selected Works by Beth Brant (edited by Janice Gould). Deborah lives in Lexington, Virginia, with her wife Margo and a variety of rescue dogs. She is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches literature of the margins and creative writing.
This talk is sponsored by the WVU Office of the Provost Dan and Betsy Brown Lecture Series.