Sovereignty as Fraught Relationality

The Case of Osage Wind
Date
Nov 15, 2024, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Location

Speaker

Details

Event Description
Jean M. Dennison

Too often the stories told about Indigenous peoples flatten the complexity of Native nation experiences, especially around environmental sovereignty and relationality. This chapter explores the deep politics behind the building and dismantling of an industrial wind farm on the Osage reservation, as a powerful window into the complexity of these issues. Colonial systems have rendered Osages a minority population in our own territory, forcing our leaders to build fraught relationships to maintain our Nation. This chapter looks at how Osage relationships with the federal government and non-Osage residents living on the reservation have impacted Osage sovereignty. In this context, the Osage Nation has attempted to use the concepts of “responsibility” and “public interest” to defend its sovereignty, which have had mixed results historically, and must be navigated carefully as a strategy to take us forward.

Jean Dennison is a citizen of the Osage Nation and an associateprofessor of anthropology at the University of Washington. Her book Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation (UNC Press 2012) speaks directly to national revitalization, one of the most pressing issues facing American Indians today. She has also published widely, including pieces in American Ethnologist, Visual Anthropology, PoLAR, American Indian Quarterly, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Jean’s current research uses grounded ethnographic methods to study various accountability practices as they manifest throughout the current Osage Nation government. The primary goal of her academic endeavor is to explore how indigenous peoples negotiate and contest the ongoing settler colonial process in areas such as citizenship, governance, and sovereignty.

Land, Language, and Art (LLA), a Global Initiative from the Humanities Council, aims to extend the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton (NAISIP) into new global dimensions pertaining to land, language, and art.

Sponsors
  • Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar: Indigenous Futures in Times of Crisis
  • Department of Anthropology
  • Princeton American Indian and Indigenous Studies Working Group (PAIISWG)
  • Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton (NAISIP)
  • Land, Language, and Art (LLA)
  • Native Graduate Students of Princeton
  • Effron Center for the Study of America