Humanities Institute Book Talk & Film Screening: "Reclamation Histories"

32 Campus Dr.,Missoula MT 59812

22 September, 2022

Description

Overview: Today, #Landback has become a popular tagline that describes Indigenous people’s efforts to reclaim their ancestral homelands. Every few months, a new story pops about a tribe buying back its land. Although many historians have rightfully emphasized the dispossession of tribal land, Native Nations have been reclaiming land in the United States for centuries. Join UM Visiting Professor Eric Zimmer for a conversation and film screening about two Indigenous land reclamation projects he’s working on. The first is the subject of his forthcoming book, Red Earth Nation: Reclamation and Recovery on Meskwaki Land (University of Oklahoma Press), which examines the story of the Meskwaki Nation, a tribe in Iowa, that defied federal directives and bought back part of its homeland in 1857, then rebuilt its community on Meskwaki land and Meskwaki terms. The other is the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project, an award-winning Indigenous-led community research and advocacy project based in Zimmer’s hometown of Rapid City, South Dakota. During the presentation, Zimmer will screen “Remember the Children,” a short documentary about the search for the graves of children who died at the school—which also led to an ongoing, years-long effort to reclaim Native land in Rapid City. Both stories offer historical context and lessons learned to anyone interested in the modern movement to uncover the stories of Indigenous boarding schools or reclaim tribal lands. Meet our speaker: Dr. Eric Steven Zimmer is a historian from the Black Hills of South Dakota. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is currently the A.B. Hammond Visiting Assistant Professor of Western United States History at the University of Montana. Zimmer spent six years as a senior historian at the consulting firm Vantage Point Historical Services, Inc., where he worked on a variety of narrative, digital, oral, and exhibit-based history projects for clients across the United States. Since 2015, he has been a volunteer historian for the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project, an Indigenous-led community research initiative in his home town of Rapid City, South Dakota. He is also at work on a book called Red Earth Nation: Reclamation and Recovery on Meskwaki Land (University of Oklahoma Press). That project explores the remarkable story of the Meskwaki Nation, a Native American tribe in Iowa that bought back some of its homeland in 1857. The Meskwaki story offers context and insight for anyone interested in the modern movement to reclaim Indigenous lands in the US and elsewhere. Zimmer’s scholarship and the collaborative projects with which he is affiliated have received high honors from the Western History Association, the Midwestern History Association, the National Council on Public History, the American Society for Environmental History, the American Association for State and Local History, and more. He has served as the primary grant author or co-PI on several projects, securing funding support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Windrose Fund, Monument Lab, the American Philosophical Society, the American Historical Association, the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Indian Country Today Media Network, and in several scholarly journals.