Land, Language and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History

With julie Reed

On Monday, April 20 at 6:30 pm, the series “Where We Live: History, Nature, and Culture’” will present a program on Land, Language and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History.

Historians largely understand Native American education through the Indian boarding schools and reservation schools established by the US government during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But Native Americans taught and learned from one another long before colonization, and while white settlers and institutions powerfully influenced Indigenous educational practices, they never stopped Native peoples from educating one another on their own terms.

In her book of the same title, Julie L. Reed uses Cherokee teaching and learning practices spanning more than four centuries to reframe the way we think about Native American educational history. Reed draws on archaeological evidence from Southeastern US caves, ethnohistorical narratives of Cherokee syllabary development, records from Christian mission schools, Cherokee Nation archives, and family and personal histories to reveal surprising continuity amid powerful change. Centering on the role of women as educators across generations in Cherokee matrilineal society, the power of land to anchor learning, and the significance of language in expressing sovereignty, Reed fundamentally rethinks the nature of educational space, the roles played by teachers and learners, and the periodization imposed by US settler colonialism onto the Indigenous experience. In this talk, Reed will discuss her time in these mountains and how this area, including Kituwah, Cowee, and Watauga, are shaping her work moving forward.

Julie L. Reed is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a member of the history and anthropology departments at The University of Tulsa. This semester, as a result of a Mellon New Directions Award, she is in residence at Western Carolina University. Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History is her second book. Her first book, Serving the Nation, traced the development and implementation of Cherokee social welfare institutions. She is currently at work on her third book, co-authored with historian Rose Stremlau, Sovereign Kin: A History of the Cherokee Nation.On Monday, April 20 at 6:30 pm, the series “Where We Live: History, Nature, and Culture’” will present a program on Land, Language and Women: A Cherokee and American EducationalHistory.

The program will be held at Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center at 51 Cowee School Drive in Franklin, beginning at 6:30.