Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity: Decolonial Imagining of Land Back
A History and Theory of New Media lecture, presented as part of BCNM's Indigenous Technologies program, co-sponsored by the Native American Studies program, the Arts Research Center (ARC), and the Department of City & Regional Planning
with Laura Harjo
Mvskoke scholar and Associate Professor of Indigenous Planning, Community Development, and Indigenous Feminisms, University of Oklahoma
“That will never happen” is a frequent response to the Indigenous Land Back Movement; this talk will share a modality of Land Back that counters the idea that it will never happen. The exhibit Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity: Spatial Storytelling with Emergent Technologies (re)members our kin as a modality of Land Back and uses Indigenous Feminisms and Mvskoke theories from the book Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. The exhibition represents spatial, sonic, and relational elements of original tribal towns and Mvskoke Futurity. Visitors access immersive digitally created physical 3-D models of two tribal towns: a Mississippian and a Pre-Removal settlement. Past and present geographies are light projected onto the surface of the physical 3-D town models. This work seeks to surface past and future emergence geographies—concrete, ephemeral, metaphysical, and virtual—of Muscogee Tribal Towns found in pre-removal Alabama and post-removal Oklahoma.
About Laura Harjo
Laura Harjo is a Muscogee (Creek) scholar, award-winning author, Indigenous planner, and teacher. She is an associate professor and the previous interim chair in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. In the 2023-24 academic year, Harjo was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Emory University, which is in Muscogee homelands. Her scholarly inquiry focuses on "community." Harjo's research and teaching centers on three areas: (1) spatial storytelling, (2) anti-violence-informed Indigenous architecture and community planning, and (3) community-based knowledge production. These three areas of inquiry support a larger project of Indigenous futurity. Harjo's book Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019) employs Muscogee epistemologies and Indigenous feminisms to offer a community-based practice of futurity. Her book won the 2020 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Monograph and the 2021 On the Brinck Book Award + Lecture.
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