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NAIS: Robert Warrior, "Native Critique and the New Indian (Art) Hating"

Robert Warrior (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, American Indian Studies)
“Native Critique and the New Indian (Art) Hating”
Thursday, April 16, 3:00 – 4:30 PM
Humanities Gateway 1030

Edgar Heap of Birds opened “Beyond the Chief," a University of Illinois version of his Native Hosts series of localized sign panels almost exactly two years after the university retired Chief Illiniwek, its controversial sports mascot tradition. Over more than two decades, the exhibit series has prompted discussion and even controversy, but Illinois was the first site that prompted vandalism and, eventually, theft of some panels. In this multimedia lecture, Robert Warrior, who curated the exhibit at Illinois, reflects on the word and text-based art of “Beyond the Chief” and its public intervention on the Illinois campus. In his recurring phrase, “Today Your Host Is,” Heap of Birds invokes not only historical Indigenous presence, but a persistence of that presence and a critical judgment on the land’s owners since obscuring its Indigenous past, present, and future. To what extent does Heap of Birds provide a concentrated version of a larger dilemma for Native people going public – including at public institutions of higher education – that critique is often part and parcel of who and what Native people bring into that space?

Robert Warrior (Osage Nation) is the author or editor of six books, including most recently, The World of Indigenous North America, a collection of 28 original chapters by many leading scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies. He was the only author to appear more than once on the list of the Most Influential Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies of the First Decade of the 21st Century, which was compiled by members of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, for his book The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction and his contributions to the Native Critic Collective’s Reasoning Together.  Warrior has taught at Stanford, the University of Oklahoma, and Cornell, and he currently serves as Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Edgar Heap of Birds feature