Sovereign Printscapes: Why Indigenous Newspapers Matter

Please join NEH Division of Preservation and Access and the Serial and Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress for a very special event on Wednesday, September 25, 2024, from 3.30 to 5.00 pm, EDT. 

In the plenary address “Sovereign Printscapes: Why Indigenous Newspapers Matter” at the annual conference of the National Digital Newspaper Program, Professor Kathryn Walkiewicz discusses the role Indigenous newspapers have historically played as a means of asserting sovereignty and countering damaging stereotypes about Native communities. Professor Walkiewicz will trace her own journey working with digitized historical newspapers from Indian Territory (present-day eastern Oklahoma) to showcase the significance of these materials for a twenty-first-century audience. She will also discuss the importance of inviting present-day Indigenous communities to steward the process of making newspapers publicly accessible through projects like Chronicling America and address some of the questions, challenges, and opportunities that librarians, archivists, and researchers might encounter as they engage in such digitization projects.

Kathryn Walkiewicz (enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation) is an associate professor of Literature and co-director of the Indigenous Futures Institute at UC San Diego. She specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies, American literary studies, print culture, and Indigenous speculative fiction. Walkiewicz is the author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (2023) and co-edited the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (2010) with Geary Hobson and Janet McAdams. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, American Literary History, ASAP/Journal, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Transmotion, Walt Whitman Quarterly, and the Rumpus.

Please register for the event. 

Sponsored by NEH and the Library of Congress, this talk is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.