This program will be held in-person at the Newberry and livestreamed on Zoom. The online version of this event will be live captioned. Please register below.
In 1857, the Meskwaki Nation purchased an eighty-acre parcel of land along the Iowa River. With that modest plot secured as a place to rest and rebuild after centuries of devastation and dispossession, the Meskwaki, or "Red Earth People," began to reclaim their homeland—an effort that Native nations continue to this day in what has recently come to be called the #Landback movement. Red Earth Nation explores the long history of #Landback through the Meskwaki Nation’s story, one of the oldest and clearest examples of direct-purchase Indigenous land reclamation in American history.
Join historians Eric Zimmer and Douglas Kiel as they discuss how the Red Earth People have negotiated shifting environmental, economic, and political circumstances to rebuild in the face of incredible pressures.
Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement will be available to purchase in the Newberry Bookshop, and the author will sign copies after the talk.
Speakers
Eric Zimmer, a historian from the Black Hills of South Dakota, holds a PhD from the University of Iowa. He serves as the Director of Philanthropy at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation. 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.
Douglas Kiel, a citizen of the Oneida Nation, is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. He studies Native American history, with particular interests in the Great Lakes region and twentieth-century Indigenous nation rebuilding. His current book project is Unsettling Territory: Oneida Indian Resurgence and Anti-Sovereignty Backlash.
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required.
Registration opens January 1.
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