Wednesday, February 5, 2003
7:00 pm
Dr. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
For her efforts as an innovator in the field of American Indian Literary Studies, Dr. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff won the 2002 Modern language Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dr. Ruoff's interest in American Indian literature began not as a scholar but as an adoptive parent of a Native American child. Ruoff's personal interest melded with her professional life as a Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where for thirty years she helped orchestrate the acceptance and appreciation of Native American literature in academia. Through her discoveries in archives and libraries around the country of long out-of-print works by Native Americans, Ruoff has shepherded dozens of obscure works back into print, providing key historical and cultural context for a literary tradition as old as the country. A consistent mentor for and influence on scholars and teachers in the field, she has been attentive to the impact of the work on American Indian students and faculty members and has fostered both Native American scholarship and creative writing.
Dr. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff is Professor Emerita of English at UIC and the former Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her publications include American Indian Literatures (MLA, 1990) and Literatures of the American Indian (Chelsea House, 1990). In 1998, Dr. Ruoff was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Book Awards, presented by the Before Columbus Foundation. In 1997, The Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers named her Writer of the Year for Annotation/Bibliography. Currently, Dr. Ruoff is editor of the American Indian Lives series for the University of Nebraska Press.
This event is being generously co-sponsored by MSU's American Indian Studies Program. This text was adapted, in part, from a December 23, 2002, Chicago Tribune article by Robert Becker, Higher Education Reporter.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
4:00 pm
Dr. Kenneth E. Lewis
West to Far Michigan is a study of the region's occupation by agricultural colonists whose presence forever transformed the land and helped to create the modern state of Michigan. This is not simply a history of Michigan but a work that focuses on why the state developed as it did. Although Michigan is seen today as an industrial state whose past is defined by the fur trade and international rivalry for the Great Lakes, agricultural settlement shaped its current landscape. Using a model of agricultural colonization derived from comparative studies, Lewis examines how this process played out in Michigan between 1815 and 1860. This period marked the opening of Michigan to immigrant settlement, saw the rise of commercial agriculture, and witnessed its integration into the larger national economy.
Employing numerous primary sources, West to Far Michigan traces changes and patterns of settlement crucial to documenting the large-scale development of southern Michigan as a region. Contemporary newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, gazetteers and legal documents transform general concepts of economic and social change into more human terms. Those involved in colonization reveal how their individual triumphs, as well as their setbacks and occasional failures, merged into a larger story chronicling the transformation of southern Michigan's cultural landscape.
Kenneth E. Lewis is Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University. He holds an M.A. degree from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He has maintained a long'standing interest in European agricultural colonization in North America and his work has examined the processes that shaped frontier societies and the cultural landscapes they created. As a historical archaeologist, he has investigated material aspects of colonization in geographical context and has written extensively on British colonization on the southern Atlantic Seaboard as well as the Midwest. His publications include, The American Frontier: An Archaeological Study of Settlement Pattern and Process (1984) and "The Metropolis and the Backcountry: The Making of a Colonial Landscape on the South Carolina Frontier," Historical Archaeology (1999). His current research is focused on the formation and development of frontier communities and their role in shaping larger processes of colonization.
This presentation is being co-sponsored by the Center for Great Lakes Culture.
Monday, March 24, 2003
4:00 pm
Dianne Baclawski
Twenty thousand years ago, mile-thick glacial ice sheets that extended from Canada to the Ohio River covered Michigan and most of northern North America. It took more than 12,000 years for the ice to melt and retreat northward, leaving a glacially scarred Michigan landscape and the newly formed Great Lakes in its wake.
By the time the first European settlers arrived in North America, even the idea of a glacier had disappeared. Except for those people living in Scandinavia and Switzerland, no one had seen a glacier for thousands of years. The new science of Geology had no understanding of how a continental ice sheet formed and the processes by which it could alter the landscape until 1837 when Louis Agassiz presented the first paper on continental glaciations. Nearly 50 years later, Frank Leverett & Frank Taylor, among others, began mapping the glacial features of Michigan - the moraines, eskers, drumlins and ancient shorelines. Their work led to an understanding of how the Great Lakes were formed and how Michigan's landscape was sculpted by glacial processes.
The MSU Libraries recently received the Leverett-Taylor Letters, a collection of more than 1100 letters and papers describing their work between 1885 and 1937. These will become part of the Leverett-Taylor Archive Collection, which will document the historical progress of glacial studies in Michigan.
Diane Baclawski has been the librarian at the Geology Library since 1977 (late Holocene). When not tracking dinosaurs or studying Michigan's geologic history, she may be found in the Natural Science Bldg. at the most down-to-earth library on the MSU campus.
Monday, March 31, 2003
4:00 pm
Susan Applegate Krouse
Veterans are honored by their community at the Ho-Chunk Memorial Day Powwow at Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Veterans are central to ceremonial and community life, functioning in much the same way that warriors have since traditional times in Ho-Chunk communities. This talk will look at the powwow and how the community acknowledges the sacrifices of warriors on behalf of their people
Susan Applegate Krouse (Oklahoma Cherokee) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University and Assistant Curator of Great Lakes Ethnology at the MSU Museum. Her research focuses on North American Indians, particularly Great Lakes communities.
For more information, see The Ho-Chunk Warrior.
This presentation is being co-sponsored by the Center for Great Lakes Culture.
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http://www.lib.msu.edu/events/colloqui.htm Last updated: February 19, 2003 Page Editor: Darren Meahl |
