Tlingit lidded basket, before 1883. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum
Speakers
- Ernestine Saankaláxt HayesAffiliationKaagwaantaan Clan, Tlingit Nation, author and Emerita Professor, University of Alaska SoutheastPresentation"Coming Home."
- Judith Daxootsú RamosAffiliationKwáashk’ikwáan Clan, Yaakwdáat Kwáan, Tlingit Nation, Program Coordinator, Haa Yoo X’atángi Deiyí: Our Language Pathway, University of Alaska SoutheastPresentation“The Spiritual Role of Ceremony and At.oow in Healing Grief”
- Guná Megan JensenAffiliationDakhká Tlingit and Tagish Khwáan Ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan, Tlingit artistPresentation"Rethinking Decolonization"
- Wayne PriceAffiliationTlingit master carver and Northwest Coast artist, Haines, Alaska
- Carin SilkaitisAffiliationDean of School of Arts and Sciences, University of Alaska SoutheastPresentation"Somatic Learning: The Need for Embodied Research"
Details
In the late nineteenth century, Presbyterian missionaries brought hundreds of Tlingit belongings from southeastern Alaska to the Princeton Theological Seminary. Moving from the Department of Geosciences to the Art of the Ancient Americas, the institutional drift of these Tlingit belongings reflects an ongoing condition of broken knowledge. Where does Tlingit art belong at Princeton University, and how might knowledge be restored to those from whom the items were taken? This symposium seeks to explore this question by reuniting Tlingit scholars and artists with these belongings. Our symposium will confront histories of dispossession and ask how we can restore ancestral connections. Speakers will reorient Western understandings of material objects towards Tlingit and Indigenous experiences of embodiment, spirituality, land, and kinship. We envision this symposium as the beginning of an ongoing partnership between Princeton University and the University of Alaska Southeast.
- Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton
- Language, Land, and Art: A Humanities Council Global Initiative
- Effron Center for the Study of America
- Princeton University Art Museum
- Program in Canadian Studies