What happens when we put Black Studies in conversation with the history of cartography? Katherine McKittrick, one of the key thinkers in Black Geographies, answers this question in a foundational essay when she writes that “Transatlantic slavery…was predicated on various practices of spatialized violence that targeted Black bodies and profited from erasing a Black sense of place.” As a result, she notes, “Black diasporic histories are difficult to track and cartographically map.”¹Katherine McKittrick, "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place," Social & Cultural Geography, 2011, 12: 948.Black Geographies as a subfield emerged in the 2000s to reckon with McKittrick’s argument, mainly, the ways histories of Blackness axiomatically raise questions of free and restricted movement; territorial boundedness and segregation; and fugitivity from the earliest plantations to the present-day prison-industrial complex. For McKittrick, the structural histories of racial disenfranchisement, plantation slavery, and the “relational violences of modernity” collectively necessitate that we consider the diversity of what she calls “alternative mapping practices.” By this she means attending to the spatial organization of maroon communities; hidden escape routes used by those fleeing slavery, as well as the frequent disguising of these escape routes in music and song; and family and genealogical maps maintained by those who had no legal or citizenship status. In this sense, Black Geographies fundamentally asks what may count as a “real” map and, more importantly, what forms of power and privilege the designation of “map” bestows on the objects it labels. Pushing this point, cartography historian Matthew Edney goes so far as to argue that “there is no such thing as cartography.”²Matthew H. Edney, 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1.Edney instead frames “cartography” as an exercise in aestheticizing and naturalizing relations of power; an idealized performance of racialized and colonial hierarchy enacted through its material output, the “map”. Edney’s observation carries special resonance for histories of Black cartography, where scholars have often framed the historic relationship between material cartographic objects and Blackness as an almost axiomatic opposition. And with perhaps good reason: looking at the cartographic archive of the slavery-era Americas, one quickly sees Blackness rendered either as an aestheticized form of subservience to whiteness, or as an irritating anti-colonial node to be eliminated.

As an example of how this tension plays out, we can look to this work from 1773, The Layout of the Conquered Maroon Village Called Boekoe, by Dutch cartographer Juriaan François de Friderici. It depicts the layout of Fort Boekoe, a fortified maroon settlement in what is today Suriname, in northern South America, that was razed by a Dutch militia in September of 1772. The map’s title and aerial-view perspective make it clear that the maroon village itself served as impetus for the map’s creation, yet only as a form of violent erasure: a dialectic that underscores why maroon communities have been such critical points of theorizing for Black Geographies. Yet, also consider the tension Friderici produces in the map’s elaborate title cartouche, held up by a Black figure whose scantily-clad form implicitly references his enslaved status. The figure enacts a colonial fantasy of converting marronage to subservient labor, and here evokes his own subjugation through the map’s material production. Yet, the figure’s equally dominating presence and confident pose also suggest the persistence of maroon life and resistance, even after Fort Boekoe’s seeming destruction.

Black cartographers have long responded to this dialectic of spectacular presence and invisible subjugation that runs through cartographic renderings of Black spaces and places. As one brief case study, in the 1940s, Louise E. Jefferson – a noted African American illustrator and designer – produced a series of works meant to interrogate presumptions of whiteness and the fixity of identity which served as preconditions for depicting the United States as a nation. In her 1945 Uprooted People of the U.S.A., Jefferson depicts abandoned villages, overcrowded transit centers, and internal refugee camps which all emerged because of the dramatic economic and social shifts wrought by the country’s World War II efforts: a depiction of the United States as a country defined by massive internal displacement and populated by what she terms “victims of war.” Her Americans of Negro Lineage, produced the following year, weaves stories and illustrations of Black doctors, musicians, laborers, and politicians together with statistics on Black populations, internal migrations, and the history of slavery.

By recasting the standard political framing of the forty-eight states as an image and icon of the country, Jefferson’s two maps themselves seek new forms of belonging in a nation defined by racial disenfranchisement; and to reckon with how a static map elides the constant histories of migration and identity-making that underly it. In this way, Jefferson’s work responds, perhaps, to one model of Black Geographies that suggests that the visibility of Black histories depends on framing Blackness as “uprooted,” and perhaps in axiomatic opposition to the modern Western nation-state and the material maps which instantiate it. Jefferson’s works provide the impetus to look backward, to ask how Black artists have thought about the history of mapmaking and its relationship to racial formation and especially to racial fixity. Stated bluntly, what demands does Blackness’ inextricability from histories of forced displacement and archival erasure place on those that wish to engage with material maps, a medium that might privilege histories of fixity and boundedness?

I ask this question by looking to the Guia de Caminhantes. Completed from 1816 to 1817, the Guia de Caminhantes (“Guide for Walkers”; hereafter referred to as the Guia), held at the National Library of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the few extant cartographic projects completed by a Black artist in the early nineteenth century.

In the Guia’s introductory text, which you see here on the top half of the cover page, its artist, Anastásio de Sant’Anna, identifies himself as an “old” painter of mixed race, and a resident of the city Salvador (also known as Bahia), a major port city in northeastern Brazil where he had long lived and where he completed the work.

The Guia has attracted scarce attention in Portuguese-language scholarship and has never been discussed in English prior to this talk. Yet, it is a rare example of a manuscript map of Brazilian territory produced outside of the context of a military or surveying expedition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Far exceeding its somewhat timid title, the Guia is more properly thought of as an atlas, and indeed, potentially the first one ever produced in Brazil: an unbound grouping of thirteen hand-drawn, hand-colored, aerial-view maps depicting, as the work’s cover page outlines, “Kingdoms and Provinces of America, especially of Brazil.” While it opens, as we will see, with a large hemispheric map of the Americas and a map of Brazil, the rest of the Guia consists of eleven aerial-view maps of Brazil’s captaincies (the name for Portuguese colonial Brazil’s political divisions), which collectively detail their rivers, mountain ranges, beaches, settlements, churches, sugar mills, Indigenous settlements, and roads: all landmarks that would be important to any early nineteenth-century “walker” referenced in the Guia’s title.

The Guia evinces the artist’s intimate knowledge of two centuries of the history of cartography and landscape painting, and these references potently intersect with the social politics around the artist’s racial identity. In turn, as we will see, these maps reproduce and subtly shift conventions of Portuguese military cartography, while also traversing the boundaries between military precision and painterly imagination. Sant’Anna produced, re-framed, and challenged the intersections of empire and racialization in a political and social context in which race strongly stratified—but did not neatly latch onto—the hierarchies of colonial society. In turn, the Guia foregrounds the antiquity and contemporary persistence of Black and Indigenous histories in Brazil and the wider Americas. As if responding to Jefferson’s Uprooted People of the USA more than a century before she produced it, the Guia frames Blackness not as diasporic, but rather as Indigenous to the Americas and in turn constitutive of the modern nation-state. In this way, the Guia starkly contrasts with the maps discussed previously by productively interrogating the opposition of violent colonial cartographies and Black alternative mapping practices. In so doing, it demonstrates how one Black cartographer crafted an intermingled vision of Black, Indigenous, and colonial histories and epistemologies to forge a novel vision of Brazilian national identity on the eve of its independence.

In the Guia’s second map, “Of All Brazil,” Sant’Anna renders latitude with “the city of Bahia” at zero (I’ve indicated Salvador’s location here with a large red dot). The gesture may speak to Sant’Anna’s pride in his home city, but it also testifies to Salvador’s critical political position as Sant’Anna completed the Guia in 1817. Though Salvador had served as the capital of Portuguese colonial Brazil since the mid-sixteenth century, the city had been relegated to secondary status after the capital’s 1763 transfer to Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of miles to the south. Salvador again toyed with primacy in the early nineteenth century as the Portuguese royal court fled the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and temporarily relocated to Brazil, making Brazil the first country in the Americas to house the government seat of a European empire. In 1808, King João VI and his family spent one month in Salvador before moving on to Rio de Janeiro; Rio would remain the Portuguese empire’s temporary capital until the Empire of Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822.

The Portuguese Crown’s relocation to Brazil encouraged the colonial settlement of the Brazilian interior, which prior to this period had been predominantly populated by Indigenous peoples who had been displaced by colonial activity on the coast. This means Sant’Anna completed the Guia during a surge of interest in mapping the country’s interior as a proxy for territorial conquest and implicit civilizing. Sant’Anna’s Guia also seems to preface the Brazilian Empire’s 1824 Constitution, which extended citizenship to anyone born in Brazil, regardless of racial background (though this excluded the millions of people of African descent then enslaved in Brazil). Even then, as Sant’Anna completed the Guia, Brazil’s “Atlantic frontier became a theater of staggering anti-Indigenous violence and the entrenchment of African-based slavery” as a byproduct of increased settlement.

Living in Salvador in the early nineteenth century Sant’Anna would have experienced the political implications of such inequities firsthand. He was part a large, vibrant, diverse Black population in a city that for two centuries had been a major disembarkation point for enslaved Africans in Brazil (and Brazil itself received around forty percent of all enslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries). In Sant’Anna’s time, two thirds of Salvador’s population was of African descent, enslaved and free, while shipping routes—established around the turn of the eighteenth century—directly linked Bahia with West African ports. Anyone walking around Salvador could see evidence of the city’s African character everywhere: African-born merchants dominated the city’s street economy by selling food and African-made textiles, while African languages were as commonly spoken as Portuguese. Bahia’s African populace also shaped its politics: a series of African-led revolts and conspiracies in early nineteenth-century Bahia shook the foundations of the city’s slavery system and its racial order.

Yet outside of the political and social context in which Sant’Anna worked, we have very little other information about him. Portugal’s National Archive contains the earliest known mention of the artist, albeit when Sant’Anna was likely middle-aged: a 1796 judicial proceeding which named Sant’Anna as defendant. The document describes Sant’Anna as a free married man of mixed race who painted maps and created perpetual lunar calendars. Over two decades before producing the Guia, Sant’Anna was already well known for his artistic and cartographic creations. The document describes him as an “official painter”, a designation suggesting that Sant’Anna was a respected professional and, by implication, an active participant in one of Salvador’s many mixed-race, Catholic brotherhoods. These religious mutual aid organizations that were a staple of Brazilian social life, many of which supported free professional artisans and craftspeople. Specifically Black Catholic brotherhoods had long served as incubators of Black agency in Brazil by purchasing freedom for the enslaved, providing social and economic aid to members, and creating pathways for social mobility and collective solidarity. Sant’Anna’s likely membership in one of these brotherhoods, though, does little to help us understand his political orientations: while directly connected to the rise of Black political consciousness through the nineteenth century, brotherhoods were diverse in their priorities and social orientations.

Attesting to the artist’s commitment to cartography, Caio Figueiredo Fernandes Adan and Iris Kantor have identified a series of unsigned early nineteenth-century manuscript maps of Brazil, which they attribute to Sant’Anna on stylistic grounds.³Caio Figueiredo Fernande Adan and Iris Kantor, A cartografia de um oficial pintor de mapas liberto: Estudo de atribuição de autoria (Bahia-Brasil, século XIX). In 8a SIAHC Siímposio Ibero americano de História de Cartografía/O mapa como elemento de ligação cultural entre a América e a Europa. Edited by Carme Montaner and Carla Lois. Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya, 2012) 120–33. Distributed at archives in Rio de Janeiro, some of these maps appear to be early studies for those found in the Guia, suggesting that the Guia was the culmination of years of study and analysis by the artist; in short, his magnum opus. Yet Sant’Anna’s decades of work in cartography prior to the Guia is striking given that he does not appear to have even been employed by the military or studied military cartography in an official capacity.

I say this because, between the mid-1700s and Brazilian independence in 1822, almost all known manuscript maps of Brazilian territories were produced in the context of military surveying expeditions. Even stranger, the Guia’s maps reproduce some of the major conventions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Portuguese military cartography: an emphasis on aerial perspective; defined captaincy borders; fastidious naming of rivers and towns; standardized representations of topographic features; and exacting scales for measuring distance. We can see at the bottom left of this map Sant’Anna precise scale for measuring distance; and if we return to the cover page of the Guia, at bottom right, we see his detailed guide for interpreting the symbols and designs on his maps.

These conventions originally emerged from eighteenth-century Portuguese military training reforms that prioritized cartographic training alongside scientific precision and technical uniformity. These military and cartographic reforms went together with desires in Lisbon to increase control over what it viewed as colonial hinterlands. Imperial reforms instituted in the second half of the eighteenth century utilized military cartography as a tool of colonial authority, conducting surveys to identify and suppress rebellious Indigenous and maroon communities while also assimilating inland territories and Indigenous peoples into direct Portuguese territorial control.

Given his lack of military background, Sant’Anna’s work in cartography prompts two questions. One is factual: how did Sant’Anna access the knowledge and military maps necessary to produce the Guia? Other scholars have productively suggested that the Bahia Public Library in Salvador may have provided Sant’Anna access to a range of manuscripts and printed maps on which to base his designs, especially since the library received a large donation of maps in 1812. Sant’Anna also would have had access to the Bahia Military Academy, where interested laymen like him could attend classes on military cartography.

But my hopefully informed speculation on the question of Sant’Anna’s access to military cartography does not answer the second question: why was he interested in mapmaking at all? One clue comes from the Guia’s long opening text, where Sant’Anna describes the Guia as a correction for the “many errors that are found in some imprecise Maps of the interior” of Brazil, by which he means military manuscript maps. Sant’Anna claims the Guia corrects the names of rivers; presents the proper names for towns and settlements; and establishes formerly erroneous latitudinal and longitudinal lines.

However, naming practices are never neutral. Sant’Anna’s Guia throughout makes “a point of giving Indigenous names to places, rivers and cities.” Sant’Anna’s reliance on Indigenous place names does not necessarily signal his investment in a kind of contemporary anti-colonial politics. Rather, I forward that it may reflect the complex and shifting implications of the ongoing Indigenous presence in Brazilian history, one which could be antagonistic to or supportive of colonial projects.

Sant’Anna’s effort to correct the “errors” of contemporary cartography begins not with maps, but with an unprecedented watercolor painting on the bottom left of the Guia’s title page.

The image depicts an encounter at “Jiquitaia”, described by Sant’Anna as a beach in Salvador formerly known as a thriving commerce center for the area’s Tupi population, the primary Indigenous group of Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Though, in 1817, Jiquitaia was home to a newly-constructed Portuguese military fort —one that still utilized the beach’s Tupi name and so shows the Portuguese imperial appropriation of Indigenous landscapes—Sant’Anna envisions Jiquitaia as a place of ethnic egalitarianism and relative peace. Sant’Anna’s painting presents a group of white European men—identified by their skin tone and their dress—trading weapons, alcohol, and other objects on the beach. Tupi persons, depicted by Sant’Anna with feathered headdresses and skirts, interact on equal footing, as do persons of African descent. The two Black women he depicts appear to be in relationships with Indigenous men; one at left holds their child. In the foreground, a man with skin tone matching the white Europeans emerges with an Indigenous woman from behind a banana tree. His red cap and feathered skirt suggest he has long lived in the area’s Tupi communities.

As the figures on the beach point to trade goods with looks of curiosity and contemplation, and as they wear clothing contemporary to the sixteenth century, the watercolor evokes a sense of initial encounter, as if the Europeans are arriving at Jiquitaia for the first time. Sant’Anna’s title for the painting furthers this reading. “Kirimurê: Ancient Gentilic name of Bahia, and place where the City of Salvador was founded”, references the beginnings of Bahian history while also emphasizing the area’s Tupi name. However, further details complicate this initial timeline. Most obvious is the figure at bottom left, wearing a large feathered headdress, which has been identified as Catarina Paraguaçu, a sixteenth-century “Tupi indigenous woman from Bahia, who was offered by her father, the chief Taparica, to the Portuguese castaway Diogo Álvares, known as Caramuru”, an identification supported by the white figure accompanying her. In turn, Sant’Anna presents Black residents in Kirimurê and shows them as full members of Tupi worlds, even though no enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil prior to the mid-sixteenth century, after the “founding” of Salvador the title references. By including persons of African descent and Indigenous names in the scene at Jiquitaia, Sant’Anna does more than forward a vision of Brazil’s multiethnic history that would soon be enshrined in the 1824 Constitution. He also argues that Bahia’s “founding” is, perhaps, inextricable from the ways Black, European, and Indigenous worlds commingled and co-evolved in Brazil, independent of the histories of exploitative labor and land dispossession that characterized the late colonial and postcolonial imperial periods.

From a contemporary vantage point, this scene of egalitarian encounter appears like an apology or erasure of colonization’s violence. However, looking to the possible inspirations for Sant’Anna’s painting, critical distinctions emerge that show the force of his vision. The painting’s wide-angle landscape view, receding into a bay and framed with Brazilian flora, suggests Sant’Anna’s familiarity with longer histories of Dutch painting used to naturalize and aestheticize Brazilian landscapes and histories of forced labor.

A 1649 painting by the Dutch artist Frans Post testifies to the role of Dutch landscape painting in aestheticizing enslaved labor in colonial Brazil. A wide view looks back to rolling hills punctuated with lakes and rivers. Industrialized sugar mills sit atop the hills at right, while enslaved people work a bit of cleared land at center. Post renders the centrality of industrialized slavery to Dutch Brazil as a natural, aesthetic inheritance of the Brazilian landscape. A small anteater traipses in the foreground, just in front of a prominent pineapple, while a tall palm tree at right – displaying ripe palm fruits dangling from the top—frames the image.

Sant’Anna’s artistic choices (see “Kirimurê” watercolor) suggest a throughline between colonially cultivated visions of tropical, edenic labor and Sant’Anna’s own painting. The foreground pineapple appears once again, as does the framing palm tree, alongside further floral additions like cashew fruits and a banana tree. However, unlike Post, Sant’Anna puts human action squarely in the foreground and emphasizes barter and economic exchange over attempts to aestheticize forced labor. Sant’Anna’s quite literal foregrounding of the word “Jiquitaia” may reinforce the point: the beach’s name is the Tupi word for the powdered form of a chili pepper native to the Americas. Highly desired by the Portuguese who purchased it from Tupi merchants, the chili was soon exported through Portuguese trade routes into Iberia and Africa. By the early seventeenth century, people across the Atlantic world instead called this chili malagueta after an unrelated but equally prized West African spice. Culturally and etymologically, Sant’Anna’s use of “Jiquitaia” harkens less to a pre-contact image of Tupi history than a wide-ranging reference to the co-evolution of Indigenous, African, and European knowledge in and through Atlantic commerce. Fittingly, Sant’Anna does not restrict Black and Indigenous figures to laborers or workers for an invisible white elite—in which the value of their lives would be restricted to their bodily production—nor, in turn, are they portrayed as being in awe of, or saved by, white settlers in the common trope of European saviorism that would run through Brazilian history paintings later in the nineteenth century. Instead, the beach scene places economic and cultural agency in the bodies and minds of Afro-Indigenous histories, while also disentangling sartorial practice and cultural identity from skin tone.

In this way, I read “Kirimurê” as Sant’Anna’s early effort to work through what the Black and Native Studies theorist Sandra Harvey outlines as a key problem in later twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black intellectual history and politics: how articulations of Black identities are often framed around what she frames as “an existential pull … that renders Black existence, especially but not solely outside of Africa, permanently and always already ‘unrooted’”. The counterpoint to that sense of displacement, Harvey notes, is often “the Western nation-state”.⁴Sandra Harvey, "Unsettling Diasporas: Blackness and the Spectre of Indigeneity," Postmodern Culture, 31: 1, 2 (2020, 2021).) Faced with a tension between Blackness’ uprooting and the patriotic cartography of Brazilian nationhood, Sant’Anna created a painting that refused to place Blackness in opposition to Indigeneity, a point underscored by the inclusion of the Afro-Indigenous child in the scene at Jiquitaia. As I detail below, he constructs a vision of Bahia’s founding that roots Blackness and even African botanicals as Indigenous. And through the presentation of Caramuru, the castaway, he refuses to let whiteness claim the political project of the nation-state, instead showing it as an equal inheritor of diaspora, Indigenization, and forced acculturation.

This vision of the co-constituted Indigeneity of Tupi and Black worlds Sant’Anna presents as constitutive of Brazil may be reinforced in the botanicals he depicts. Cashew fruits, at left (see “Kirimurê” watercolor painting), are native to Brazil, but bananas and pineapples—two fruits that Sant’Anna positions as native in this retelling of Bahia’s founding—were transported to Brazil from West Africa in the sixteenth century. While Frans Post’s mid-seventeenth-century painting participates in a longer colonial strategy of cultivating visions of botanical hybridity to aestheticize and naturalize the violence of settler colonialism, Sant’Anna reframes foreign transplants—which include human beings and cultivated plants—as altogether native to Bahia. This is what separates Frans Post from Sant’Anna: the latter asserts the antiquity of Indigenous and African shared knowledges and harkens to a diverse, vibrant world that includes them both, independent of histories of European domination. However, complicating this reading is another background detail showing how Sant’Anna continues to play with timelines: a battle scene likely referring to the 1625 joint Spanish–Portuguese reconquest of Salvador following its Dutch occupation. Perhaps Sant’Anna is collapsing the major events of Bahia’s history here, but it also speaks to the proto-nationalist tone of his Guia by re-envisioning the moment when Bahia was brought back under Portuguese imperial sovereignty, a point that may have carried strong weight as Brazil served as temporary home to the Portuguese Crown.

Why might Sant’Anna be asserting this vision of Afro-Indigenous antiquity and Brazilian national and imperial pride all at once? What motivated his project to imagine the political contours of Blackness outside of a diasporic framing?

Sant’Anna’s self-description on the cover page as a “painter” as well as an “old pardo” may reveal much about his intent. Pardo, a Portuguese word which has no translation into English, is the general term still preferred by multiracial Brazilians to describe themselves. In the early nineteenth century, pardo indicated a person’s African—and potentially also Indigenous—ancestry, but also more generally referred to someone who was neither white (branco) nor Black (preto), with the latter term typically suggesting enslaved status. As was true throughout colonial-era and early imperial Brazil, vocabularies and self-definitions of color were often “more to indicate social positions than referring specifically to an individual’s nature.” In this sense, pardo was often equivalent to mulato—another term referring to multiracial ancestry—but mulato carried stronger pejorative connotations. Sant’Anna’s upbringing in the second half of the eighteenth century took place around what the historian Miguel A. Valerio outlines as a “popular notion that mixed-race Afro-Brazilians constituted colonial Brazil’s most deviant and unruly socioracial group.” In this context, Valerio elaborates, those who could often expressed a “preference for the term pardo instead of the sullied one of mulato, [which was] popularly associated with licentiousness and ungovernability.”⁵Miguel A. Valerio, "The pardos’ triumph: The use of festival material culture for socioracial promotion in eighteenth-century Pernambuco," Journal of Festive Studies 3:49, 2021.

Sant’Anna’s self-definition may be related to his artistic prowess. Pardo artists in late colonial Brazil had greater access to artistic work and exploration and so could pursue opportunities unavailable to darker-skinned Brazilians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, Sant’Anna may also have been invested in showing the role of pardos in the formation and participation of a nascent Brazilian national identity, as well as negotiating their political position in the midst of the movement of the Portuguese court and the African rebellions at the time he created the Guia. Sant’Anna’s sole reference to racial categories in the Guia is telling in this regard.

The Guia’s fifth map,depicting the captaincy of Mato Grosso in central Brazil, contains an intriguing detail along the bottom edge. Here, Sant’Anna relays the story of Tomás da Natividade, a pardo man, who was made a salaried infantry captain by the governor.

Why would Sant’Anna have gone out of his way to relay this little-known story? Did Sant’Anna delineate Natividade’s race as pardo—same as the artist—as a testament to his social position, either by status or by aspiration, to prove pardos’ participation in the construction and maintenance of the Brazilian state? Did Sant’Anna also testify to the position of pardos in a social context where they routinely faced barriers in compensation for their service in colonial conflicts? Intriguingly, Sant’Anna may have known pardos in Bahia as both artisans like him and militia members: at the time he completed the Guia, 60% of Salvador’s fourth militia regiment, which was reserved for mixed-race Brazilians like Sant’Anna, were employed as artists. Three were painters. But all likely held far less wealth than their white counterparts in the second regiment. While mixed-race Brazilians were common in Portuguese militia ranks, as were Indigenous Brazilians, their racial status posed frequent barriers to earning full salaries and land rights. And finally, might the reference to Natividade here remind the Guia’s readers of the political differences between Africans and Brazilian-born creoles like Sant’Anna, none of whom participated in the Bahia rebellions, and indeed, were likely among the militiamen who suppressed an African-led uprising near Salvador in 1816, just as Sant’Anna began work on the Guia?

Small details like this begin to put the viewer on notice of the multiple, overlapping political interventions in Sant’Anna’s work. This continues in the first manuscript map of the Guia: a planisphere of the Americas.

As art historian Tatiana Reinoza has outlined, the planisphere was deployed as a technology of what she calls the “Western cartographic gaze” and a proxy for territorial conquest and racial hierarchization reproduced on countless travelogues and cartography manuals dedicated to the colonization of the Americas, as we see in this 1703 frontispiece.⁶Tatiana Reinoza,  Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023): 18. Yet here, the map’s cartouche at bottom center—typically the domain of colonialist fantasies about Americas as an unpopulated territory prepared for the wide implantation of European settlements, or the deployment of figures that confine and define Indigenous and Black labor—instead emphasizes Indigenous empires. Sant’Anna’s text notes the “city of Mexico” and the “city of Cusco”, capitals of the Aztec and Inca states, respectively, their first and last rulers, and those rulers’ undoing by the Spanish in 1521 and 1533. Again, Sant’Anna not only highlights the antiquity of Indigenous civilizations here, but even asserts a new theory of the peopling of the Americas: Sant’Anna titles his map as actually identifying the “parts” from which those who populated the Americas came: “if from Asia, as various authors write, see the parts of China, Japan, and Tartary …and those who came from … Europe and Africa”. Sant’Anna collapses the entire history of the Americas’ peopling, putting all histories of forced and voluntary migration on equal footing while, importantly, decentering Europe spatially and discursively.

Sant’Anna’s map of Brazil, second in the Guia, further suggests his inspiration from much earlier works. Most maps of Brazil at this period were oriented with north at the top, while also outlining the Atlantic coastline and fleshing out the country’s interior: moves reflective of a kind of cartographic proto-nationalism that sought to form Brazil into an identifiable territorial boundary prior to independence in 1822. Such maps helped to render the nation as what the historian Sumathi Ramaswamy calls a “geo-body” necessary for would-be citizens to “see” the country politically and, in turn, to socially attach themselves to it.⁷Sumathi Ramaswamy, 2014. Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India. In Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 420.This scheme was then reproduced on a global range of engraved and teaching maps after Brazilian independence, such as this example produced in Philadelphia in 1818 (below, left).

Sant’Anna’s Brazil breaks from this schema, orienting west at the top, a change that neither formed part of Sant’Anna’s corrective efforts nor would have been reproduced in any contemporary work. This style harkens to the sixteenth and seventeenth century, where European—especially Dutch—colonial cartographers commonly oriented Brazil with west at the top, such as in the 1644 example (above, right), which became the basis for nearly a century’s worth of maps in its wake. Also note here that this map contains a prominent inset, at top, depicting the bay of the city of Salvador, and so further speaks to Sant’Anna’s Bahia-centrism.

Sant’Anna’s Brazil also reduces the size of the Atlantic Ocean so that the west African coast peeks through the bottom right. This required shifting of the spatial dynamics from the planisphere the map before, suggesting the move is intentional. This style of showing the tip of Africa with Brazil emerged in the 1500s. Common through the middle of the eighteenth century, this style emphasized Brazil and Africa’s proximity to imply the facility of trafficking humans and goods between them.

In some cases, the link was explicit: the frontispiece to French trader Jean Barbot’s 1688 travelogue concerning his time in West Africa depicts the ocean as a connector between Brazil and West Africa, while two Black figures—aesthetic, celebratory archetypes of the slave trade—flank it. Yet this singular framing of Brazil and West Africa had effectively disappeared by the early nineteenth century. Is Sant’Anna here continuing to extol the slave trade as the backbone of Brazil’s economy—potentially a point that could further distance his racial subjectivity from associations with slave status? Might he also be subtly referencing Brazil’s strong African presence, something further suggested by the oversize importance given to Africa in the planisphere, where the continent almost dominates a map purportedly focused on the Americas? And if so, how does this detail operate in tension with the scene at Jiquitaia, which effectively refuses an image of Blackness tied to Atlantic slavery or diasporic African origins?

Sant’Anna’s eighth map, which depicts northeastern Brazil, may further testify to his work’s historical references and the multilayered histories of diaspora that inform it. Again, shifting typical orientation conventions by depicting northeastern Brazil with south at the top – he loves playing with perspective and directionality – Sant’Anna includes a critical detail: at the bottom of the map, he paints a small black building and labels it “Tapera de Angola; or Palmares.”

Palmares is the common name for a collection of maroon polities that existed in this region during most of the seventeenth century. At its height, Palmares had a population of many thousands, and was politically powerful enough that it conducted major conflicts and signed treaties with the Portuguese and the Dutch. Yet Palmares’ assumed destruction in 1695 means that it was an atypical location to be referenced on a map of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, only one other known map from Brazil’s entire colonial period—a map of this same region commissioned in 1766—names Palmares.

Moreover, the Guia’s pairing of “Tapera de Angola” and “Palmares” is unique in the history of cartography. The name “Tapera de Angola” only appears on one other known map: at the far bottom right of Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu’s oft-reproduced 1662 map of northeastern Brazil, depicting the region’s occupation by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century. Sant’Anna’s use of this phrasing suggests he used Blaeu’s map specifically as a source of inspiration, nearly a century-and-a-half after its production (and in turn further supports the idea that Sant’Anna is taking broad inspiration from seventeenth-century Dutch Brazilian visual culture).

Naming Palmares in this way may have carried special resonance for Sant’Anna’s evocation of Brazil’s constitutive Afro-Indigeneity. On one level, “Tapera de Angola, or Palmares,” brings into intimate relation phonemes from three languages: “tapera”, an Indigenous Tupi word referring to a ruined or destroyed settlement; “Angola”, the central African polity strongly associated with Palmares, and the region commonly cited as its cultural and philosophical origin point; and “Palmares”, the Portuguese term for palm trees. Sant’Anna uniquely intermingles these sounds on the map, as if linguistically reproducing the kind of multiracial egalitarianism painted on the Guias’s frontispiece. Beyond the multivocality Sant’Anna’s naming provides, we cannot know how Sant’Anna understood the words’ meaning. Did he know, for example, that “tapera” referred to an abandoned settlement? What might this have meant for his evocation of “Angola” and the suggestion that this African polity, or at least its memory, existed or was even at home in Brazil—yet another iteration of the continent’s vibrant proximity to, and co-constitution of, the Brazilian state? If Sant’Anna did understand Palmares as abandoned or destroyed, what might he suggest by re-naming it here and connoting the potential for regeneration and new settlements in the area, maroon and colonial alike, long after Palmares’s destruction? And finally, how might we put this point in conversation with Sant’Anna’s insistence that previous cartographers had made “imprecise” maps of the interior of the state? Why did he make a specific choice to emphasize this historic terminology, and thus bring into sharp relief the coeval histories of Black, Indigenous, and white European diasporas? As elsewhere, Sant’Anna’s work provides few clear answers. Yet, perhaps it is precisely his emphasis on multilayered, multi-referential ambiguity, and the strategic intermingling of colonial, Black, and Indigenous epistemologies that provides the Guia its force.

I want to conclude with the words of geographer Chérie N. Rivers, who writes that “To explain [one’s] origins in relation to a modern political map is to accept a specific construction of space and time that imprisons [oneself] in the geography of global power.”⁸Chérie N. Rivers, To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022) 31. For Rivers, the line drawing and mapmaking of longstanding colonial relations presumes a geographic and spatial fixity that attempts to force racial subjectivity into a kind of essentialized boundedness and, in so doing concretize its utility for political and economic exploitation. Anastácio de Sant’Anna worked in the wake of cartographic projects of the colonial Americas which resonate deeply with Rivers’ argument about attempts made to codify and subdue racial identities in the service of proto-nationalist imaginaries, slavery economies, and military conquests. Yet, as “real” maps attempted to instantiate racial hierarchy, practices of Black fugitivity and independence threw them into ontological crisis. As outlined at the beginning of this essay, the work of theorists of Black Geographies show the consistent inadequacy of maps produced in the service of colonial projects, either by intentionally obscuring forms of resistance embedded in the very landscapes they represented, or by failing to incorporate—as a function of their medium—the manifold processes by which those in diaspora exist and move in and remember the world.

In its foregrounding of Black and Indigenous histories and placenames, in its evocations of Africa’s proximity to Brazil, and in its presentations of Blackness’ Indigeneity to Bahia, we might see in Sant’Anna’s Guia an effort to visualize those very forms of place- and space-making obscured by colonial military cartography; to, in other words, re-map and re-animate Black and Indigenous lives beyond the confines of the modern political map. The Guia explores and disentangles the historical timelines, diasporic histories, and racial imaginaries that pushed its maker to occupy a subjective position in the racial strata of the Portuguese Empire and the nascent Brazilian state. In this way, perhaps the Guia functions less as a political statement than as Sant’Anna’s attempt to work through the contours of a racial and political schema that asked him to choose between his mixed-race ancestry and his patriotism, or between his Blackness and his rootedness in and patriotism to Bahia. The Guia interrogates the extent to which cartography may not erase, but rather could foreground, a vision of Black history as part of the state’s geo-body. The Guia may not signify “an outright rejection of the colonial geographic and cartographic project as much as an underscoring of its inadequacy”, which might “distinguish patriotic art’s investment in the map form from the state’s command mapmaking ventures.” Through his genre-bending experimentations across painting and cartography, Sant’Anna attempted to rethink the genealogy of cartography in his homeland, all while asserting his—and other pardos’—sense of belonging and centrality to it.

About the Author

Matthew Francis Rarey is associate professor and chair of the Department of Art History at Oberlin College. He is author of Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023). This Southern Spaces presentation is derived from an essay published by Professor Rarey in Arts in 2024, available here.

Introduction

In many ways, artists are first responders—to repurpose a term often used in public health. Soon after COVID-19 shutdowns began in March 2020, artists took to their studios, desks, and Zoom to bear witness to the pandemic and the tragic experiences of morbity and mortality that upended millions of lives. Throughout the pandemic, artists continued to serve on the emotional frontlines of COVID-19 interpretation.

Unlike the 1918 influenza pandemic, which is often referred to as the “forgotten pandemic,” COVID-19 took place in an era of global connection and social media, allowing for new audiences and shared artistic production. While scientists worked to understand the novel SARS-CoV-2, many artists leaned into the disruption that COVID-19 caused, discovering innovative strategies to interpret the impact of the pandemic individually and collectively.  Artists across the globe investigated the heartbreak, poignancy, and isolation of the pandemic. Some turned to forms of humor. Novelists and poets wove narratives. When theaters were forced to close, performers found innovative ways to stage their productions and attracted new audiences on Zoom. Impelled by the pandemic, artists from around the world gathered online in August 2020, for the Edinburgh International Festival’s “Artists in the Age of Covid.” They examined new work and forms. They pondered the future of the arts, post-pandemic, and they asked, “what is the irreplaceable impact of the arts?” Stand & Witness: Art in the Time of Covid addresses that question.

Stand & Witness: Art in the Time of COVID-19 brings together an international group of artists, poets, authors, and performers to help us understand the individual and collective experiences of a pandemic that reshaped cultures and societies. 

The title Stand & Witness is excerpted from “From 'Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters',” a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung published in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, (North Adams: MA, Tupelo Press, 2020).

Sponsored by the David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Office of Communications and the CDC COVID-19 response. Additional support provided by the Consulate General of Canada to the U.S. Southeast. The Stand & Witness exhibition ran from June 17–October 25, 2024 at the CDC Museum in Atlanta.

About the Authors

Louise E. Shaw served as curator of the David J. Sencer CDC Museum from 2002-2023, where she developed history and art exhibitions relevant to the work of CDC and public health. Previously she led Nexus Contemporary Art Center (now Atlanta Contemporary Art Center) and served as assistant curator at the Atlanta Historical Society (now Atlanta History Center).

Heather E. Rodriguez (contractor, Chickasaw Nation Industries) is the assistant curator at the David J. Sencer CDC museum. During her time at the museum, she has spearheaded the COVID-19 Collection Project and helped curate several exhibitions. Her areas of interest are the intersections between public health, sex, race and ethnicity, and United States culture.

Steve Bransford is senior video producer at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.

Public Health in the US and Global South is a collection of interdisciplinary, multimedia publications examining the relationship between public health and specific geographies—both real and imagined—in and across the US and Global South. These essays raise questions about the origin, replication, and entrenchment of health disparities; the ways that race and gender shape and are shaped by health policy; and the inseparable connection between health justice and health advocacy.

Beginning in 2022, the series expands to include 1000-word blog posts, as well as longer commentaries, essays, articles and media productions that address the public health and political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic from multiple perspectives. The series editor for Public Health in the US and Global South is Mary E. Frederickson.

Introduction

Craig Womack: Welcome, everybody, to Atlanta and to Emory University. Welcome to a place where Muscogee Creek people have had government, jurisdiction, and land tenure since time immemorial—way back before the written records. Because this is the heart and soul of where Creek people come from, we feel that this is an important place to have this discussion.

Our panelists include Andrew Adams, currently a justice on the Muscogee Creek Nation Supreme Court. At two different times he's served as chief justice of that body, and he has worked with other tribes, including seven years as chief justice for the Santee Sioux. Justice Adams has also conducted legal work for Chippewa bands in the Midwest. We're glad to have somebody who's in the trenches the way that Andrew is in terms of the matters that we're talking about today. Andrew is a full member of Tvlahasse Wvkokaye Creek Ceremonial Grounds.

The first time I can remember meeting Andrew—and please understand, at this point in my life sometimes the things that I think I remember never actually happened—but my memory of meeting him was at the old location of Tvlahasse Grounds in the mid-1990s. We were the guests of Helen Burgess and Jim Burgess at a Green Corn event that was scantly attended, as far as people in the ring. It was a baptism by fire in the sense that we got thrown into doing a bunch of stuff that a couple of newbies usually wouldn't be doing. I ended up keeping the fire in the ring that night. A year or two later, at that location or at the new grounds site, I got to meet Andrew's dad. Another fond memory.

Craig Womack: Professor Barbara Creel is a member of Jemez Pueblo. Much of the early part of her career, after graduating from the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1990, was in the Pacific Northwest, in the state of Oregon, where she spent seven years as assistant public defender. She was involved in defending reservation residents who were prosecuted under the Major Crimes Act. This is a piece of federal legislation that has a very strong bearing on the case that we're discussing today. She was also a liaison between Oregon tribes and the Army Corps of Engineers whose big water projects often have overlapping jurisdictions with tribes. Professor Creel joined the UNM law school faculty in 2007. She's the former director of the Southwest Indian Law clinic and is now directing her own project on Indigenous innocence, representing Native Americans in post-conviction appeals.

Our moderator this evening is Professor Megan O'Neil, who will be assisting with audience questions after the panel discussion. Professor O'Neil teaches here at Emory and is Faculty Curator of the Art of the Americas. She is a specialist in the ancient Maya and Mesoamerican cultures.

Sarah Deer is in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. Before this, she was a professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in the Twin Cities for almost a decade where she taught federal Indian law. She's co-authored three books on Native constitutions, tribal legal studies, and tribal criminal law. Her 2015 University of Minnesota Press book, The Beginning and End of Rape, won numerous awards. This area of inquiry is highly significant to our discussion today since the McGirt case not only has to do with tribal jurisdiction, but also with issues of sexual violence. 

Professor Deer is a MacArthur Fellow and in the Muscogee Creek Nation. We're very proud of her having captured this award. She's currently the Chief Justice of the Prairie Island (Minnesota) Community Court of Appeals. She was also a judge for three years for the White Earth Chippewa nation, another Minnesota tribe. She's testified before the US House of Representatives, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and many other federal committees and agencies. She has served multiple federal appointments, including chairing the US Attorney General's task force on sexual assault in Indian Country.

The other day I went out to my mailbox. Hope reigns eternal that someday there will be something good in there, and there was! Instead of bills, I pulled out a package from Dustin, Oklahoma. It was from a friend of mine and a friend of Sarah's, Rosemary McCombs Maxey, who's a language teacher, an activist, and a person involved in educating Creek young people. There was a note in the package—Sarah and Rosemary had sewn me a COVID mask out of Creek patchwork. I'm now convinced I have the coolest COVID mask on the planet. It's got this Creek patchwork running down the middle. Now I'm all masked up with nowhere to dance!

I'm going to say a few brief things about Creek history. I've spent a month trying to whittle my comments down to a manageable way of talking about a topic that's very difficult to contextualize in terms of this Supreme Court decision. It requires extensive historical knowledge as well as the need to describe how crimes are prosecuted on reservations. And it involves a complicated narrative about how Oklahoma tribal jurisdiction has a unique status in relationship to other Indian reservations across the United States.

When I've looked at the recent media coverage of McGirt, I've often found it disappointing, even when I read reputable papers like the New York Times. There's no way to fully cover the topics I just mentioned in newspaper articles. You would be hard pressed to cover them in a book, and there is little doubt that books will be written about this decision. My summary is too brief and reductive, but I'm going to flash forward through a huge expansive history. I'm going to skip Creeks as ancient mound builders, skip colonial history and Creek Nation relationships to the English and to the Spanish before them. I'm going to skip the early part of the nineteenth century when Creeks fought a civil war against one another in 1813 and 1814. And I'm going to skip the forcible removal of Indians in 1836 from this very area that I'm speaking from and from other parts of Georgia and Alabama.

I'm going to fast forward all the way up until the American Civil War when Creeks had barely recovered from the traumatic 1836 removal from Georgia and Alabama. They had suffered loss of life, loss of culture, loss of livelihood, businesses, and farms. They had to start all over. They had to find families to take care of all the orphans whose parents had died during the removal. During the 1860s, when the US Civil War occurred, the official Creek government headquartered in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, sided with the Confederacy. There were a disproportionate number of Creek leaders who had close ties to the Deep South: economic relationships, cultural influences, and, to some degree, plantation systems. Some leading Creek governmental figures were slaveholders. There were also those who had sympathies with the Union. Many of these Creek Union sympathizers fled to Kansas during the conflict. Many Creek men volunteered to join Union forces. The Creek leader Chitto Harjo went to Leavenworth to serve in a Union army unit.

We all know the end of this story. Fortunately, the Confederacy lost the war. Creeks were then forced to renegotiate their treaties with the federal government. They signed the Treaty of 1866, as it's come to be known, which, like most treaties, involved a land cession. One of the things that Creek people had to do was sell a big chunk of the western portion of their lands. The idea being, supposedly, that this area would be used by the United States to resettle other tribes. But the United States also wanted to open it up for eventual white settlement. In spite of having to make that land cession, this treaty made several strong guarantees about Creek sovereignty and jurisdiction into perpetuity in the territory. Because of this, many Creek leaders today regard the 1866 treaty as sort of the gold standard of Creek treaties.

The Civil War was a disaster in Creek country. It split the nation in two. Farms and mills were burned to the ground, infrastructure destroyed. A cholera epidemic ran rampant, killing many. Two decades later, when Creek people had begun to recover from this, they got hit with another disaster for Indian America across the United States. This is the Dawes Act of 1887, federal legislation that forced tribes to allot land that had previously been held in the tribal domain to individual tribal members. The "surplus land" was then opened up to white settlement. This is a main reason that reservations have a checkerboard pattern. Sometimes people think just Indians live on reservations, but because of the Dawes Act, there are also non-Indian residents there.

From Indian Territory's early inception, the United States government set it aside by congressional act as a place for tribes to live and govern themselves. So, the US had to approach the tribes in the Territory—in a way that they didn't have to approach tribes in the rest of the United States—to ask if they would be willing to voluntarily comply with allotment. The southeastern tribes were against allotment and especially against the dissolution of tribal government that was part of the process. The US federal policy idea behind this is that as tribal citizens accepted allotment certificates they eventually would become US citizens and have the same legal status as anybody else in the United States.

If you don't get anything else out of this talk, you can take away the "Native 101" fact that that tribal people, unlike any other minority group, ethnic group, or any other racial group, are defined differently from a legal standpoint in the United States. They constitute governmental entities that have the right to a government-to-government relationship with the United States federal government. With the passage of the Dawes Act, the United States was thinking maybe it could also work itself out of the Indian business, so to speak—which is to say work itself out of the unique status guaranteed to tribes. Sometimes people call this status a trust relationship, not because Indian tribes and the government particularly trust each other, but because of this unique legal standing that involves the right to self-government.

Congress found itself in a bind, having to ask the southeastern tribes, unlike other tribes in the US who weren't located in a special territory, if they'd allot land, if they'd give up tribal government. The tribes said no. Congress, being the entity that passes legislation in relationship to tribes, then flexed its muscles by expanding its plenary powers, the rights it has to pass regulations relevant to tribes, to the nth degree. It tried to make those powers as fulsome as possible by passing the Curtis Act of 1898 which forced the Indian Territory tribes to allot.

One of the things that's really striking about the Curtis Act, from the perspective of someone like me who's not a legal scholar, is that it legislates that the tribes can't have legal representation, can't contest the Act, can't rise to their own defense. With the tribes being forced to allot, the Curtis Act was an assault on tribal government, tribal land, and tribal culture.

After the Dawes Act was passed, then the Curtis Act in Indian Territory, of course tribes didn't disappear. They still organized themselves and formed political entities. After this, the federal government tended to recognize tribal governments on an ad hoc basis. There was a lot of inconsistency. From my perspective, it seemed to work this way: the Bureau of Indian Affairs says, "Okay, here's a tribe that's cooperative. Here's a tribe that opens up its reservation for exploitation of its resources to outsiders; that lets people come in and harvest timber, water, mineral resources, good tribal government, duly elected, we recognize this one." But then there's this other tribal government that's not so keen about letting people come in and take water, timber, and minerals. Then the BIA cries foul, claims this one as bad government they don't recognize, for any number of reasons they create. Since some tribal governments were recognized and others weren't, there was a growing web of confusion with no national template or cohesive policy.

In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt appointed John Collier to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier, a much more progressive leader than his predecessors, successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act. This legislation, often called the "Indian New Deal," allowed tribes to form constitutions if they chose to do so, to submit them to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for approval, and, if they were approved, then they were allowed to form governments that the United States would recognize.

I'm going to leave it at that. The panel can correct my mistakes and I will not be offended. Sarah is going to describe how the status of the Creek Nation has changed since the July 9, 2020, McGirt Supreme Court ruling. Then we'll see what other panelists want to say.

Panel Discussion

Sarah Deer: Thank you, Craig, for that great introduction and thank you all for inviting me to be part of this panel. As a Creek citizen, this is a case that will have deep meaning for us for many years to come. And as a disclaimer, I'm here today in my personal and academic capacity. Because I also advise the Creek Nation, I want to clarify that I don't speak here in any official capacity, on behalf of the Nation.

I want to make sure as we discuss this case that you've got the basic facts. We're talking about two cases here, but the one that counts is McGirt v. Oklahoma, which was argued online due to COVID-19. We could all call in and hear the oral arguments—we're not used to that. Most of the time you have to go in person.

The decision was released in July on the very last day that decisions were announced. I think it's clear that this is one of Justice Ginsburg's final, if not the final, votes of her tenure on the Court. It's interesting that we focus on reservation law with this case, but actually both of the cases at issue here began as criminal cases. I'm glad that Professor Creel is on our panel because she'll have some more insight into the work of how criminal defense attorneys think about reservation issues.

But there were two cases. There was a case involving Patrick Murphy (Sharp v. Murphy), who was convicted of homicide and sentenced to death by the state of Oklahoma. And then the case's (McGirt v. Oklahoma) namesake here, Jimcy McGirt, a Seminole man who committed some heinous sexual crimes on children and received a draconian one thousand years in Oklahoma custody. So, these are two men that had very little to lose by appealing their decisions. When you're on death row, you've got attorneys who are trying any way to save their client's life. And from Mr. McGirt's standpoint, there was not a lot to lose by challenging jurisdiction. But both of these men, and even the state of Oklahoma would agree, committed their crimes within the boundaries of the 1866 reservation that Craig discussed.

From the perspective of a criminal defense, the fact is that if this is an Indian Reservation, if it still exists, then these two men were prosecuted by the wrong government. Under the Major Crimes Act, the federal government has criminal power over lands considered Indian Country and the state does not. So their argument on jurisdiction hinges on the question of whether or not the 1866 treaty is still the standard by which we assess Creek territorial jurisdiction. There were other cases that came before this, that did not have to do with the Creek Nation but answered a similar question: Is the reservation still there or not? Do the boundaries still apply or not? And the rules that the Court has created over the years require that Congress explicitly change the governing territory of the tribe. There were two other cases in the last thirty years in which the Court held that only Congress can establish a reservation and it cannot be inferred. It has to be explicit.

Attorneys for Murphy and McGirt argued that the defendants were prosecuted by the state of Oklahoma, which did not have jurisdiction over them. Now Craig did a great history here, so I don't need to go through all of this, but it was in 1866 that this treaty was signed. And really the language of the treaty that I think Justice Gorsuch focuses on in his written decision is the very clear language that this land—and again, there was half of it ceded in 1866—would be forever set apart as a home for the Creek Nation. And this is consistent with the other treaties that the Creek Nation had signed, even those prior to removal. So the language was consistent—words like "forever" and "perpetuity" are important for the contemporary interpretation.

What Justice Gorsuch did in McGirt was write the official decision on behalf of the majority. It was a five-four split. Writing for what people characterize as the liberal arm of the bench, Justice Gorsuch determined that because there had been no explicit language by Congress, despite allotment, despite demolishing tribal courts, despite all of those things which Oklahoma certainly argued, there was never a clear disestablishment of the reservation by Congress. Therefore, the 1866 reservation still exists. Therefore, McGirt and Murphy were prosecuted by the wrong government.

The Creek Nation and other amicus clients filed briefs in this case, and the ultimate outcome was one of victory—not just for these two criminal defendants, but for the Creek Nation and potentially many other nations. Justice Gorsuch writes that on the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise, and "because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word."

I want to share two more quotes from McGirt to emphasize how emotional this decision was for many of us. It felt like it set things right for the first time in a long time. One of the passages I so admire from this decision is that "Congress may sometimes wish an inconvenient reservation would simply disappear. But wishes don't make for laws." These kinds of principles transcend Indian law and speak to what justice really is about.

Justice Gorsuch also writes, "None of these moves by Oklahoma would be permitted in any other area of statutory interpretation and there is no reason why they should be permitted here. That would be the rule of the strong, not the rule of law." And finally: "Unlawful acts performed long enough and with sufficient vigor are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right."

Because today is Indigenous Peoples' Day, this particularly resonates with me. It isn't just about this Creek tribe and this Creek reservation. It's about a justice of the Supreme Court acknowledging the harms that were done and fighting for justice today.

So now we have a reservation. We always had one, but now it's recognized again. And what that means is that our territorial reach as a nation is far further than we have been exercising it. The Creek Nation now has full territorial reach throughout the boundaries of the 1866 reservation. Which is about a twelve to thirteen county area, including a great deal of the city of Tulsa. We are now tasked as a nation with governing that reservation and with the challenges posed by a large expansion of recognized territorial reach. But these are challenges that the Creek Nation is ready to take on.

Prior to McGirt, the Creek Nation had what we call Indian Country, a legal term of art referring to land that's been in trust or has a restricted status, owned in fee by the tribe—plots of land, whether they be former allotments or contemporary business district holdings. That was it. That was Indian Country. Once you step off that plot of land into the state of Oklahoma, then the state would no longer recognize you as being in Indian Country. But one of the definitions of Indian Country is all lands within the limits of any Indian reservation. So if the reservation still exists, our authority in terms of criminal law doesn't just rely on a particular plot of land; it's going to be anywhere within the boundaries of the reservation. This is a dramatic increase in recognized territorial authority.

Craig Womack: Professor Creel do you have anything you would like to add?

Barbara Creel: Yes, thank you for inviting me. Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day. Know that you are on Native land that was inhabited before contact, before the white settlers came. The McGirt case is one of the most important Supreme Court cases in land acknowledgement.

As far as background to McGirt, I wanted to add a couple of things. Professor Deer mentioned Sharp v. Murphy which started out in the Tenth Circuit as Murphy v. Royal and percolated up to the Supreme Court. It was argued and set for re-argument, but it was going to be a four-four split because Gorsuch had recused himself. You see, the decision was a Tenth Circuit decision from when he had been on that court. He didn't write that decision, but it wouldn't be proper for him to weigh in on it from his new position on the Supreme Court.

McGirt didn't change the status of the Creek Nation or expand tribal jurisdiction. McGirt recognized that the tribe had ancestral lands that were documented in treaties and congressional enactments. Federal criminal jurisdiction versus tribal jurisdiction versus state had been established in the 1883 case of Ex parte Crow Dog, which led to the Major Crimes Act of 1885. So, as Professor Deer said, if it was Indian Country and a murder after 1885, the case would be prosecuted in federal court.

Craig Womack: Along the lines of talking about ideas that came out of the 1883 case, I want to ask a question. And this very much comes from the perspective of someone whose head swims when hearing legal history. (Mainly I write novels and I play the fiddle.) But my question is this: since the McGirt decision recognizes Oklahoma tribes as having reservation status, does this ruling simply catch up Oklahoma tribes to the rest of Indian Country—much of which has had reservation status for a century now—or does it do something more?

Andrew Adams III: I guess I'll jump in quickly. First of all I thank Craig and Emory University and everyone that put this together. And I will give the same disclaimer that Professor Deer offered: I'm here speaking in my own personal, individual capacity. But to quickly answer your first question, Craig. I approach it from the standpoint that the status of the tribe didn't change, but the status of the law and essentially the federal government's posture and position related to the Muscogee Nation, changed.

The Muscogee Nation didn't change. But if you think about it in very practical terms, before the McGirt decision was issued, the Department of Interior didn't have to recognize or give any credence to the reservation boundaries. But after the Court issued its decision essentially reaffirming—and I say "reaffirming" because I don't like the terms "recognized" or "reestablished." Those reservation boundaries never went away. I can remember my first year of law school at the University of Tulsa in 2003 sitting in Professor Rice's office (whom I affectionately call Uncle Bill) and him saying, "Nephew, your tribe's reservation, you're sitting on it. You're living on it right now." I had always heard these stories about the reservation going away and he said don't believe any of that. "Congress is the only entity that can take away or diminish a reservation. And by golly nephew, when you moved down here from Michigan you moved onto your homeland."

And so when the decision was issued, it struck me emotionally. I already knew that Uncle Bill was one of the smartest people I'd ever met. But it just drove that belief further home that nearly twenty years ago, Uncle Bill—and not only Uncle Bill, but also one of the colleagues that I have on the Supreme Court, Justice Leah Harjo-Ware, when she was the attorney general for the Muscogee nation years ago—that nearly twenty years ago he made those same arguments.

There are a lot of Muscogee people who have walked with that belief close to their hearts and minds.

Then to answer your second question, Craig, the existence and disputes and concerns about reservation boundaries permeate across Indian Country. There are a number of tribes that either are in some type of dispute with, say, a county sheriff over who has jurisdiction over what people over what geographical area, or they could be in federal district court, or in some type of court of appeals where they're trying to press their case as to why the boundaries that are identified by the federal government or a state government or some subdivision of a state government are not correct.

I believe that what McGirt has done for Indian Country is to reaffirm all of those decisions in the past like Solem v. Bartlett and Hagen v. Utah where Congress is the only entity that can diminish or disestablish a reservation. And you actually see just in the time since McGirt was decided, a positive cascading effect on other federal courts, where they have provided some favorable decisions for tribes. As an Indian law practitioner and someone who, when I wake up in the morning, kind of feels like Luke Skywalker—that I fight for the good guys, that I represent tribes—I hope that continues. I hope that various levels of government get to the point where they do have that respect for tribal homelands.

Craig Womack: Thank you, Andrew. Do other panelists want to join in this discussion about reservations status?

Sarah Deer: There's been a lot of backlash from both state officials and the general public in Oklahoma, whom I don't think fully understand what McGirt means. No, it does not mean that five tribes own the east half of Oklahoma as it's somehow been suggested. Nothing changes the status of the land within the reservation. If you own a home in Tulsa or Glenn Pool, nobody's going to take that home away from you. If you're a private business and you have your business on the reservation, the status of the land where you run your business does not change. What it changes, though, is the extent to which the tribe's sovereignty is matched in the territory that it exercises; the Creek Nation has more options for exerting governmental power now. But in no way does it does it take somebody's land away or take their livelihood away. And I think that's been misrepresented in the press quite a bit.

Craig Womack: A lot of what we have heard and read about has focused on the tribe having increased jurisdiction over criminal cases. It's being depicted as an advantage. But we have also heard about the tribe now having more cases to take care of than ever before, and some have said, the situation may be overwhelming to the extent that there may be a need for expansion of the tribal court system. I was thinking when I listened to Professor Creel's podcast, which is really excellent, about her insights into the Major Crimes Act and how this act is still imbued with a colonial viewpoint. So are there other advantages, or any disadvantages, to be considered?

Sarah Deer: I'm going to let Professor Creel answer the crux of that, but yes, again, a lot of people don't realize that, technically, tribes retain concurrent authority over felonies on reservations. That's misunderstood when people read the Major Crimes Act as though it was a grant of exclusive jurisdiction to the federal government. Tribes in some states, not all, prosecute homicide, rape, and child sexual abuse, but by and large, when we think about those kinds of crimes on reservations, we think about them "going federal"—so the US attorney's office becomes involved. But certainly the tribe can also independently exercise that kind of criminal authority. To the extent that one would calibrate justice for victims with more tribal prosecution, the tribe is now in a position to do that on a much grander scale. But it does require additional staffing to be able to govern that big of a stretch of reservation. In terms of the criminal defense perspective, I'd like to ask Dr. Creel.

Barbara Creel: Thank you, Professor Deer. I would like to hear from the tribe about advantages and disadvantages, but I know from my criminal law teaching that sovereignty is what sovereignty does. As a sovereign, the tribes have incredible power to shape their own justice systems. I teach the differences between the American cultural and moral values and Indigenous cultural values and rely heavily on Sarah Deer and Carrie Garrow's book, Tribal Criminal Law and Procedure, in which they discuss where tribes get their inherent decision making about what wrongdoing is and how to punish it. How do sovereigns address wrongdoing in their own jurisdiction? It's powerful to think about. We could start over, right? We could be a Crow Dog nation that looks to restorative and rehabilitative justice instead of retribution.

We all know that the first thing we hear on Indigenous Peoples' Day is the parade of horrible statistics that Native Americans are subjected to. This case provides opportunity for the defendant who was a community member and the tribe to be on the same side. That does not happen in Indian Country cases. It's usually the United States acts as a punisher and the tribe acts as a punisher. But at this point, the two interests converge between the individual defendant and the tribe. I think it promotes what I teach: tribes are made up of individuals. What I was taught from my family values is that the people are the heart of the tribe. The tribe is the body and the people are the heart.

The advantage is having tribal sovereign government rethink its criminal jurisdiction and do differently than what the adversary system has imposed upon us. The disadvantages in this line of thinking are what Professor Deer mentioned: we're so far behind in resources in our own justice systems because they were taken away or encroached upon due to the Major Crimes Act.

We are impoverished in the ability to think and rethink about justice. I've taught tribes how to look into their own history to decide how to move forward. This was a foreign concept, either because the state took over after termination or because of the Major Crimes Act. But because of this rule of history that Gorsuch mentions—this is always the way we've done it, so we're going to keep doing it that way—tribes have lost their own thread of thought in how to treat wrongdoing. They've been without resources and basic governmental functions.

Andrew Adams III: When you think about federal policy related to Indian tribes over the last two hundred years, it's gone through different themes. Since the Indian Self Determination and Educational Assistance Act, the federal government has been in this mindset of self-determination—that tribes should be self-determining in expanding their sovereignty. So the biggest advantage that I see from McGirt is that the decision opens up a lot of options for the Muscogee Nation to expand and mature its jurisprudence. It expands the different types of cases that can come before the Muscogee Nation courts. I believe that the volume will increase and with that more opportunities for the courts of the nation to issue decisions that further the maturation of Muscogee case law.

Craig Womack: Thank you, Andrew. I want to ask one more question of Sarah, and of course anyone else can weigh in on this. Since McGirt has to do with tribal jurisdiction and sexual violence, can you address these two topics in relation to one another?

Sarah Deer: Certainly. What's interesting about this case is that I worked with a Cherokee attorney named Mary Kathryn Nagle, and we've been filing amicus briefs in Indian law cases for the last five or six years. We feel like the voices from Indian Country of victims of crime are not often presented to the Court. We did that in McGirt and in Murphy. Our primary client was the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center, a large national Native nonprofit that's dedicated to ending violence against Native women and children. We argued on behalf of McGirt and on the side of the tribe that these cases belong in tribal court. To the extent that we have strange bedfellows, I think it's worth noting again that this idea of sovereignty matters for victims and sovereignty matters for defendants. Tribal nations are in the best position to make decisions about how to protect people and hold people accountable. It may seem ironic that a victims' rights organization would side with somebody alleged to do some pretty horrific things, but the end goal of making sure that tribal nations are strong and capable of protecting one another is at the core of what any sovereignty battle is about—the battle to define what's right and wrong and how we resolve those questions.

Barbara Creel: That's Indian law, right? We're a unique, interesting, quirky, crazy quilt of jurisdiction. I wanted to add another point with regard to disadvantages. Tribes have the power to adjudicate criminal acts on the reservation. Because of separate sovereignty and the dual sovereignty doctrine, a Native American can be facing up to a year in jail without the benefit of counsel. Natives are the only people that that happens to in the United States. We're the only ones that can go to jail without an attorney. Natives are also subject to double jeopardy because they can be prosecuted by their own tribes and by federal court under the Major Crimes Act. The problem of over-policing and over-criminalizing and over-incarcerating Native Americans has a long legacy. In footnote six of the McGirt decision, the Court says some helpful things about land recognition and Native rights and points to the Pueblo Indians in the case of United States v. Sandoval. But that 1913 case was one in which the Supreme Court was trying to decide who was an Indian, and whether Pueblo Indians were Indian because there was no definition. What did the Court look to determine whether Natives were Indians? Behaviors and stereotypes. They decided that Pueblo Indians were dimwitted, had plural marriages, practiced non-Christian religions, and were in need of guardianship. That's the legacy that continues to thread into these 2020 cases. We're still carrying around those labels.

Craig Womack: Thank you. We're going to move to questions with the help of Dr. Megan O'Neil, assistant professor of art history at Emory University and faculty curator of the Art of the Americas at the Michael C. Carlos Museum.

Question and Answer Session

Megan O'Neil: Thank you, Craig. The audience has posted many questions, which I think speaks to how important this work is.

First I want to read a comment from an attendee, Stuart Fenton: "The language used by Justice Gorsuch was beautiful, brings tears to my eyes, even though I'm not Native. I'm a lawyer, however, and Jewish so I understand deeply the wrongs done to your people; similar wrongs have been done to mine."

How about the more general question about the implications of this decision in Indian Country outside of the Creek Nation?

Sarah Deer: I think the way in which Gorsuch challenges the other justices to confront the ugly history of federal Indian law and to look at what really happened on the ground could have impact on cases involving tribes that have related concerns about questions of self-government. His ability to look and be honest about the history is, I hope, a template for justices ruling on Indian Country cases in other contexts.

Megan O'Neil: Here's a question regarding what's written in the McGirt majority opinion, that there is no reason why Congress cannot reserve land for tribes in much the same way, allowing them to continue to exercise governmental functions over land even if they no longer own it commonly. How would such a conclusion affect the outcome of Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, et al. from 1998?"

Sarah Deer: Venetie is a devastating case out of Alaska. It actually came out when I was a law student. It made me wonder why I was in law school, it was so poorly reasoned. But it's a question of tribal territory, really a different animal, because it's looking at the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act, which is not applicable in the lower forty-eight and certainly not in Oklahoma. So, I would love to see Venetie reconsidered, but I'm not sure McGirt really changes anything as far as that decision goes.

Barbara Creel: I agree. Venetie was looking at the definition of Indian Country and deciding whether the Alaskan Native corporations fit within one of those definitions and found that they did not.

Megan O'Neil: Here's a question from Sarah Hill asking if you could comment on the response to the decision by the Cherokee Nation and the state of Oklahoma.

Sarah Deer: Well, the state of Oklahoma is pretty unhappy, and that's been expressed by a number of state officials, including the attorney general, who referred to us as "sovereignty hobbyists" in one of his disparaging comments about our efforts to expand tribal authority. I can't speak to the Cherokee's official position or not. Each tribe is unique and different.

Megan O'Neil: This next question is for Justice Adams, from Veronica Passfield: "After attending graduate school with Andrew I moved to Oklahoma City. Governor Stitt created a committee to strategize about how to adapt to McGirt. His committee included oil and gas CEOs, but no tribal leaders. I'd like to hear thoughts on McGirt backlash and how the community can advocate to help offset it."

Andrew Adams III: It's appropriate that we're having this conversation on Indigenous Peoples' Day. The parade of horribles you hear from individuals, from the state attorney general and Senator Inhofe, claims that the Supreme Court is creating an untenable situation in Oklahoma where the Muscogee Nation is going to be able to exercise "enhanced jurisdiction" or "extra jurisdiction" over its reservation. People say that the sky is going to fall if you give these Indians authority over their land again.

A lot of people, when they think about reservations and about treaties, think about the United States saying, "Okay, we're going to give you this land." But there's another way of thinking—and there's power in words—that reservations are the land that the tribes reserved for themselves. It wasn't anything that was given to the Muscogee Nation. This was land that the Muscogee Nation saved for itself as a homeland in exchange for other rights. Anyone who predicts the sky is going to fall, they are perpetuating the settler mentality imposed upon Indian peoples. The US Supreme Court did the right thing by issuing this decision. And now let the state of Oklahoma and the Muscogee Nation work as sovereigns.

Megan O'Neil: This next question is from Sarah Armstrong, a current public defender in Atlanta, a University of New Mexico alum, and a former student of Professor Creel. "What advice can you give to non-Native defenders of Indigenous rights, especially with respect to this decision?"

Barbara Creel: Every time I work with a person from a different family, a different community, a different tribe, a different government, I treat that experience as one of an ambassador. Learning about the particular tribe. I teach the way to be an ally is to promote Indigenous wisdom and Indigenous voices. Learn about the ancestral lands which you are standing on right now and elevate the voices of Native people. Educate yourself but know that each tribe is different. There is no pan-Indian way. Combat willful ignorance. Don't give up because these issues are complicated. Be willing to fight those injustices where you see them.

I appreciate the work of the Indigenous Women's Network and of all those who come to these issues with their own wisdom and with the experiences of having lived through violence or the criminal justice system or being court-involved.

Megan O'Neil: The next question is for Professor Deer, regarding sexual violence law jurisdiction in Indian Country: "How do you hope the case against McGirt and other cases of sexual violence committed in this region will be pursued? How does the Violence Against Women Act come into play, and how might the Creek and other Native nations bring Indigenous perspectives to such cases?"

Sarah Deer: Thank you for the question. Yes, Mr. Murphy and Mr. McGirt have both been indicted in federal court, which was the appropriate court that should have had their case from the beginning. While some headlines suggested that McGirt is leading to the release of dangerous persons, the reality is that McGirt and Murphy are still under the jurisdiction of the United States and are going to either plea or be prosecuted by the US attorney. So as far as they're concerned, the question might be, "Could the tribe also prosecute them under concurrent authority?" Certainly, going forward, the Creek Nation has a homicide law. It has a rape law. It has a child sexual abuse law, a child pornography law. So, the Tribal Council, the legislative branch of the tribe, has passed laws which suggest that the government would like to see authority in those cases. Only time will tell. I do think that the tribe has the potential at this point to take other kinds of crimes under tribal law. That'll be an interesting development, and as Professor Creel noted, we're not necessarily wedded to the Western law-and-order model. We can create therapeutic models of justice. Many tribes have done that. It's a very interesting time to be Creek.

Megan O'Neil: "The Supreme Court has not ruled on whether the Major Crimes Act divested tribes of jurisdiction, but it's widely accepted now that it did not. However, there's contrary language in some Supreme Court decisions. As I read the Gorsuch opinion, it doesn't have any definitive language suggesting he views the Major Crimes Act as divesting tribes of power, but there's some language that could be read as suggesting he assumes it did. Can you say anything about whether or how the opinion might affect tribal jurisdiction over major crimes or how the tribe might be approaching the question?"

Barbara Creel: That sounds like Professor Rolnick.

Sarah Deer: Thanks, Professor Rolnick, I'm sure we can write a law review article on this question at some point. I think any reference to whether the tribes retain jurisdiction or not in Gorsuch's opinion is a matter of dicta. Of course, you know, I think the reasoning that only Congress can divest tribes of jurisdiction would apply here. That the Major Crimes Act did not divest—there's no explicit language in the Major Crimes Act divesting tribes of jurisdiction. But yes, you're right. The question is not definitively answered in the Supreme Court at this time, but I feel confident that using this kind of case as a precedent will aid that if it does come before the Court at some point.

Barbara Creel: I read the opinion, too, with Gorsuch saying that the Major Crimes Act encroached upon tribal jurisdiction, but it was a limited encroachment in that it was specific enumerated crimes. It's widely accepted that there's concurrent jurisdiction because of Supreme Court decisions that say the dual sovereignty doctrine applies. I think that there have been implications that both the tribe and the feds have jurisdiction.

Megan O'Neil: Here's a general question about Muscogee Creek language: "As someone who was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, currently living in Massachusetts, I advocate for linguistic human rights being a native Spanish speaker. And I'm wondering if any of the scholars in the panel know about laws regarding language access or language advocacy, not just for the Muscogee language or the Creek people, but any of the hundreds of Indigenous languages in the United States."

Craig Womack: I'm not sure I can answer this question. For a long time, Sarah and I were in a group that got together to speak Creek with our mentor Rosemary McCombs. One of the things that Sarah was always interrogating was whether or not there are certain Muscogee words or ideas that had to do with legal principles. So, Sarah, did you want to say something about this? You can answer it better than I can.

Sarah Deer: I have to admit, that while I am a language learner, I don't know much about any federal or governmental policies about promoting language per se. I tend to focus my scholarship in the criminal arena, but there are people actively trying to save the Creek language today. It is an endangered language. We do have a linguist that committed himself to our language. His name is Jack Martin at the College of William and Mary. He co-authored our dictionary and grammar book. It is always an ongoing process to save an Indigenous language and our tribe does have a language department and there are a couple of colleges in Oklahoma that teach Muscogee language. But beyond that, I don't know that I have a lot of knowledge to bestow.

Craig Womack: I don't know of any state that has recognized a Native language as an official language.

Barbara Creel: New Mexico's constitution guarantees access to the courts in additional languages besides English. That means Spanish and Native languages. Because of the Major Crimes Act, Native language certifications are really important. States with large Native populations or states that care about Native citizens can pass a statute with regard to language access in the court system simply on a due process basis. The Pueblos come at it from a little bit different viewpoint in that my tribe has language immersion at Head Start. Language is spoken in the home and in intergenerational daycare. There's also a lawsuit in New Mexico suing the state department of education for lack of language access and services for Navajo and Pueblo speakers.

Andrew Adams III: I'll just quickly add that there are tribes all across the country that have passed tribal laws concerning traditional and Indigenous intellectual property protections. Often, tribes will identify their language as being part of that corpus of information that they consider that needs to be protected and archived and will actively budget funds for that protection, not looking to the state or the feds.

Barbara Creel: In my tribe, there is a rule against sharing the language because Pueblo language is not for public consumption. You don't find it taught in community colleges as you do in other tribes. It exists for internal purposes and is imbued with concepts that shouldn't be shared with others. The tribal language provides a different function than English does.

Megan O'Neil: Thank you so much. Here's a question from Ed Barker who's asking if McGirt affirms Congress's power to extinguish Indian Country. What do you all think about that question?

Andrew Adams III: From my standpoint, McGirt does essentially prop up the legal concept, the plenary power over tribes, right? That Congress, if it wants to, can pass statutes that dramatically change the legal relationship between the United States and federally recognized Indian tribes. And in this current environment, in some respects I don't mind that.

Sarah Deer: I agree, and I think that's been a big critique, especially by scholars who raise the question, "Is this really a victory if it continues to recognize Congress's plenary power?" In response to that, I'm not sure we will ever have that victory in the Supreme Court. What's important to note about this question is that tribal interests have had a much better go of things working with Congress than working with the courts. We tend to lose in the federal courts quite a bit, but yet we've managed to sustain some pretty progressive legislation in Congress. So if Congress is the place to go, I feel like the political process offers more ways to pursue tribal interests. We don't have control over the litigation that comes up about our sovereignty within the federal courts. But I don't think at this day and age, you would see a complete repudiation of Congress's plenary power, but one can always hope, I suppose.

Sarah Deer: I've written on tribal law, but primarily on violence against Native women. And because I get asked a lot, I finally made a website where you can find my writings at SarahDeer.com.

Barbara Creel: I'll also recommend the Sarah Deer, Carrie Garrow book that I mentioned before, Tribal Criminal Law, as a ready resource for people that just want to understand criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country with really good examples of Native thought in criminal law.

Conclusion

Craig Womack: This has been an amazing discussion. Not only for those of us on the panel, but for the impressive level of experience of the audience—people who went to law school with, or are former students of a panelist, academics such as Sarah Hill, who've written about southeastern people, grassroots people doing work in Creek country, law students across the country, law professors. And all the other members of the audience who have listened in. I'm excited too about the potential, as Professor Creel said, of being able to do things differently and maybe to expand into more ways of looking at restorative justice and creative approaches to governments and alternatives to punitive-based approaches to criminal justice. It's exciting to think about where this might lead us. Cehecvres, see you all again.

About the Panelists

Andrew Adams III is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and member of the Tvlahasse Wvkokaye Ceremonial Grounds. He currently serves as Justice of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Supreme Court, Chief Justice on the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska Supreme Court, and Justice on the Gun Lake Tribal Supreme Court.

Barbara Creel, a member of the Pueblo of Jemez, is a professor of law at the University of New Mexico School of Law and former director of the Southwest Indian Law Clinic.

Sarah Deer is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the School of Public Affairs and Administration. Professor Deer is also the Chief Justice for the Prairie Island Indian Community Court of Appeals.

Craig Womack is an Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee Native American literary scholar, writer, and teacher, and an associate professor of English at Emory University.

“If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would... It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss.” —David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (When I Put My Hands on Your Body), 1990

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison

Introduction

At ten years old, visual artist Forrest Lawson remembers being bullied on the playground of his Fort Myers, Florida, elementary school. Other boys targeted him with a particular pejorative word mostly used against gay men. Lawson's teacher would observe this bullying, eventually reporting it to his parents. Late one night, Lawson remembers his father pulling him aside, asking him about what was going on at school, and giving him a directive that has come to shape how he understands his ethic as an artist: “Stiffen your wrist, otherwise you’ll have to learn how to fight.”

“Although it took many years to process this statement personally in terms of my own coming-out as a gay man and my relationship with my father,” Lawson says, “I’ve realized that my artwork is how I’ve learned to fight. It’s how I fight back in the ways I know how for myself and for others. I consider my work as activism, operating in a mode promoting social justice and change for all LGBTQ+ people. My wrist might not be ‘stiff’ in the way my dad intended, but I think my artistic mission is mighty.”

Now twenty-nine, Lawson is pursuing a MFA degree in Sculpture and Fine Arts at the University of Georgia. He first began exploring art as an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida, where he received a BFA degree. Lawson has shown his work in numerous group exhibitions, and in 2019 he was honored with the Grand Prize of ArtFields in Lake City, South Carolina. From June 2–27, 2020, his work was on display in “Eros, C’est la Vie,” a show “celebrating queer artwork and artists” at Gallery 110 in Seattle. Gallery proceeds from this show will be donated to Gay City in Seattle, and Lawson will donate his personal proceeds to Black Visions Collective. Through October 31, 2020, Lawson’s work was featured in “Existimos (We Exist),” which “brings a community of queer artists voices out of the shadows to transgress, transfigure, transpose, transform, and transcend the limitations of a binary world where queer becomes a verb and not a noun.” In our wide-ranging conversation, I asked Lawson about growing up gay in Florida, the origins of his artmaking, his artistic influences, moments of shared LGBTQ+ trauma which motivated much of his art, how he’s learning to integrate queer joy and other positive affects in his subject matter, and how the current pandemic has shaped his artistic exploration of loneliness. We end our conversation remembering and honoring the forty-nine lives lost at the Pulse nightclub shooting in central Florida.

Convoluted Beginnings: Heterize, Placebo, "Closeted"

Solomon: We might as well begin with Florida. According to 2018 data from the UCLA Williams Center, LGBT adults comprise 4.6 percent of the adult population in your home state of Florida, which is statistically tied with Georgia as the highest percentage of any “southern” state. And this number, of course, reflects only those who disclose. While sixty percent of the state is protected against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation in private employment, housing, and public accommodation through local measures, there is currently no statewide law, and the June 15, 2020 Supreme Court decision specified only employment discrimination nationwide.¹As Skyler Swisher wrote in an article for the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 2019, sixty-eight percent of Floridians support LGBT anti-discrimination laws, which led some to hope 2020 would be “the year for Florida to protect gay and transgender people from discrimination.” Yet, one attempt, the Florida Competitive Workforce Act, died in the civil justice subcommittee in March 2020. There’s no statewide ban on conversion therapy and twenty seven percent of LGBT Floridians live below the poverty line. The seesaw potential of queer progression and regression is not unique to Florida, but I wonder if you have observed that 60/40 split, that separation between 60 percent of the state, which does protect LGBT people, and the other 40 percent. Could you tell me about your background growing up gay in Florida?

Lawson: Florida certainly isn’t unique in this, and an exception to this rule is hard for me to imagine. I was born and raised in the part of Florida that I would say is proud to count themselves among the 40 percent that don’t protect LGBTQ+ people. The area is also considerably below the median income line with a large blue-collar work force. The scarcity of work as well as an ingrained preconception about queer people contributes to many being unwilling to disclose their sexuality. Self-preservation. But it’s also true that a significant part of my work and practice actually comes from how I grew up in my very conservative, “southern,” working-class household in Fort Myers, a little-known town between Naples and Fort Charlotte in southwest Florida. I was raised in a very "non-progressive" environment, I guess is the best way to describe it. I grew up in the closet like most southern people do, and that contributes to the direction I’ve taken with my work, especially with the beginning. My practice started with me exploring shared feelings and traumas in the closet and how to create a sense of solidarity within a community that I did not yet have access to in any concrete sense. Because I grew up in such a small conservative town, I didn’t really have a visible queer community of my own; there wasn’t a large group of people that I could gravitate towards to seek mentorship. What I did have was the church, within which I felt I constantly had to negotiate my own identity as a child. I continue to deal with the daily onslaught of Christian pushback as a queer adult. And I think you see that in my art.

Solomon: So much of your work speaks directly to the intersection of faith and sexuality in places such as Fort Myers, which resonates with many other spaces and experiences for queer people across the South. Two of your first pieces were titled Convoluted, and they feature a series of biblical passages often used to condemn homosexuality.²Bible passages included in Convoluted’s web: Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Mark 10:6–9, Romans 1:26–32, Romans 13:8–10, 1 Corinthians 6:9–11,17–20, 1 Corinthians 7:2, 1 Timothy 1:8–11, Hebrews 13:1–5, Jude 1:5–8. It is my understanding that you cut those passages out of a King James Bible in order to “convolute” them and symbolize how some people bend, misconstrue, misinterpret, and mistranslate biblical teachings in the present in order to align with their socially conservative worldviews. That all biblical teaching and meaning making is a convoluted process. Is that what you were envisioning for these two works?

Lawson: That’s exactly how I imagined the pieces would be interpreted. Art and religion can both be misinterpreted, and with the Convoluted pieces I wanted to make sure what I was saying was “on the nose,” more or less. As much as it came from a place of frustration, the process became somewhat cathartic. When I was growing up, I tried to research as much about specific Bible passages mentioning homosexuality as some sort of defense when the subject was inevitably brought up around the dinner table. There are several passages that refer to Jesus helping heal a man’s servant, and looking back at the Greek and Hebrew translations, the word is also used to describe a same sex partner. I made the mistake of asking a pastor about it, thereby confessing my lack of faith, and his response was disappointing to say the least. He dogmatically insisted that the Bible was not open for interpretation. Not getting answers from faith leaders, I turned to art. The Convoluted Bible pieces were the first major breakthroughs that I had in thinking that I could be an artist and take this path. Like you said, they’re about the mistranslations and miscommunications of Bible teachings. I grew up in a Southern Baptist setting so it was all about how preachers and pastors and Sunday school teachers would miscommunicate many of the core biblical teachings in service of a political endgame that I did not recognize as “Christian” in any sense. Convoluted #1 and #2 are deeply emotional pieces for me; they helped me begin to understand how art could serve as a way to unravel many of the misguided teachings that surrounded me as I grew up as a queer person.

Solomon: Beyond the Convoluted pieces, interrogations of how faith meets sexuality continue to permeate your work. Heterize (2019) merges religious dogma with a convoluted history of pathologizing homosexuality as a “disorder” in need of a “cure” or “fix.” While I think the “Return to Eden” will be familiar to every queer reader who has been taunted with the “It’s not Adam and Steve” line of argument at some point in their life, what was the concept behind Heterize and do you see it as an extension, expansion, and/or revision of your concerns in Convoluted?

Lawson: I see Hetereize as both an extension and an expansion of Convoluted in that it extends my exploration of faith while expanding to discuss medical science’s responsibility to queer subjects.

Homosexuality was considered a mental disorder up until 1973, and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) didn’t officially rule reparative therapies as an ineffective strategy in “changing” sexual orientation until 1998. Dr. Robert Spitzer, one of the key members of the campaign to de-pathologize homosexuality in 1973, published a study in 2003 that many interpreted as an argument for homosexuality as a choice, that homosexuals can change their orientation.³R.L. Spitzer, “Can Some Gay Men and Lesbians Change Their Sexual Orientation? 200 Participants Reporting a Change from Homosexual to Heterosexual Orientation,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 32 (2003): 403–417. It added fuel to many churches’ fire in maintaining and extending their “conversion” practices, using established and “credible” scientific applications alongside spiritual exorcisms rooted in the rhetoric of shame and damnation. All to “fix,” “cure,” “convert” gay and lesbian people.

Heterize is based on my research of churches and organizations that practice conversion or reparative therapy at this intersection of faith and interventionist “medical” treatment. Reparative therapy is still legal in 29 states (2020) but has been widely discredited by the APA and is proven to be detrimental to the mental health of LGBTQ+ individuals who are forced into or even willingly participate in conversion therapy. These conversion centers operate from some of the same misguided principles I explored in the Convoluted series. They promote sexual and spiritual purity, accepting only procreation as divine decree and sole purpose of sexuality and homosexuality as a perversion of that decree. All the while they ignore some of the basic tenants of Christianity. This is why I list “Hospital for Ideological Reform” on a box of Heterize: bigotry under the guise of medical science.

But, again, a box of Heterize also confronts the responsibility and culpability of medical science in conversion therapies. Apomorphine, primarily used to treat Parkinson’s disease but has also been promoted as a treatment for alcoholism and heroin addiction, and the hormone Oestrogen are used in conversion practices to subdue libido as well as induce vomiting at the onset of perceived homosexual arousal. That’s why I list them as supplemental ingredients on the Heterize box. Heterize is meant to confront the absurdity of conversion therapy with its own level of absurdity. Think what it would be like if you could take a pill or inject a drug developed by science to change aspects of who you are, and that your spiritual home taught you that was your only option. It’s an absurd thought when you stop and think about it.

Solomon: Heterize might merge a faith-based critique with a more clinical form, but it’s not the first time you’ve thought about injection/ingestion as treatment within your work. Both operate strongly as a sort of interactive component, one in which viewers would not necessarily directly participate (inject/ingest), but they would feel that artistic invitation implicit in the work itself. I’m thinking here of your works around Placebo, which on one level examine the self-medication many queer people deploy (drugs/alcohol) to cope with the world around them. Each door in your Placebo Triptych, for example, features a different substance, geltine capsules (pills), a white powder, and syringes as if the person living inside each door is composed merely of the substance.

Lawson: Yeah, the Placebo Triptych (2018) is the culmination of various experiments with the idea of how queer people ingest daily words of hatred and devaluation and the accumulation of those daily homophobic micro-aggressions often become the foundation for a profound self-loathing that can often only be “treated” by filling the void with other “pills”: drugs, alcohol, substances. A placebo by definition has no value therapeutically, and I wanted to play off that idea for queer people navigating self-actualization. That just as you can’t be converted or fixed via the intrusion and twisting of religious ideology, there’s nothing that can numb you to the pain of getting beyond where you’ve been to become who you are meant to be as a fully embodied person in the world. Addiction is a problem in the LGBTQ+ community, and I wanted to confront that directly with both the Placebo Triptych and Daily.

Solomon: I know you’ve said the Placebo pieces represent the “cyclical futility of trying to escape the shame of being gay,” and the text in Daily in particular is based upon the journal of a man who underwent reparative therapy who described all the pills he had to take in a day. I wonder how you think of your own “gay shame” journey and the closet structure that figures prominently in much of your work. Could you say a bit more about how you navigated your understanding of sexuality in a place like Fort Myers, where you said earlier there were no visible queer networks and mentors for you? Was there a day when you just decided “I’m coming out”?

Lawson: I didn’t have a real sense of community in Fort Myers, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one there that I perhaps didn’t have access to. I didn’t really know of other queer people growing up, and the ones I did know of were through my parents who advised me to keep my distance in their stigmatizing vein of thinking about “deviant” sexuality that did not fit their ideal Southern Baptist man. I came out of the closet the day I graduated high school. But I had “come out” as an artist so to speak much earlier. Becoming an artist wasn’t an option for a very long time despite my having always been creative. As I child I was bullied and in an attempt to become “one of the guys,” I would draw erotic female figures to see if I could get the approval of my straight counterparts. I did that for a few years, maintaining a straight macho façade while continuing to draw and practice my art. I never took any art in high school because it was considered a very “gay” thing to do, and I had to avoid that perception to protect myself where I was. But then, I graduated high school, came out, and went to college in Orlando. I started by majoring in architecture, and I think you can see that structural and conceptual idea of form in my work. Architecture morphed into allowing me to think about how to blend my artistic life with a professional practice, but during my second year, I realized I was having a lot more fun making things, making objects, rather than the strict conceptualization of space and how people maneuver through it. But it’s interesting because now I’m coming full circle and beginning to research more about queer spaces and how we navigate them both in terms of accessibility and as terrains for intimate and affective encounter. The room that we’re able to take up.

Solomon: Wow, that’s powerful: “the room that we’re able to take up.” I want to come back to that idea of how your work is taking a more spatially aware turn lately. But first, you said you were bullied a lot growing up, and I think two of your art projects reflect both the experience of growing up being bullied and being closeted. “Smear the Queer” is a game many children enact on the playground: the target is the person holding the ball, who is labeled the “queer,” who must be “smeared” or tackled. The goal for the “queer” is to run and avoid being tackled. At least that’s what I remember from playing it as a kid. Your Smear the Queer speaks to the bullying many LGBTQ+ youth experience, but I would argue it also helps us understand the symbolic function queerness performs in our cultural consciousness: the one who must first be identified then “taken out” is the queer. The queer doesn’t fit. You used casts of your own teeth in the piece? A wisdom tooth at the center surrounded by other teeth jockeying for central position? Were you thinking about wisdom tooth extraction as a kind of metaphor for queer removal when you worked on this piece?

Lawson: I don’t know if I can claim I was thinking about wisdom teeth and surgical extraction specifically, but I was definitely thinking about how I was being excised from my social group and using teeth as a symbol for that. This piece started out with my own experience being bullied. As I said earlier, so much of my background informs my art. For me specifically, I was a quiet, very emotional young man, and I liked to play house with girls over football with the boys. I made other young boys uncomfortable because I wasn’t the ideal representation of a “man” (especially within my Christian private school), and unfortunately, I became a screen on which to project their own misguided ideals of proper masculinity. The wisdom tooth is extracted sometimes because of the perceived misalignment it will cause, even if the tooth is perfectly healthy, and I think this becomes a great proxy for the queer experience. As such Smear the Queer moved beyond my personal experience with bullying and evolved into a response to the number of reported hate crimes in the US. In my research I found that of the reported hate crimes committed towards the LGBTQ+ community, 57 percent of them were towards gay men. In the piece, I use 961 teeth to represent the approximate number of deaths that occurred in 2014 as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Yes, the teeth are cast from my original tooth and are arranged around it in the center of the composition. Dyed wax is used to symbolize gums and to represent the shared identity of the victims, connecting each tooth and creating a singularity and a metaphor for the shared struggle. If I thought about excision, it was in the sense of how a hate crime cuts a life short and I wanted to include those 961 teeth to reflect the sheer numbers of hate crimes against LGTBQ folk each year. Of course, one is one too many.

Solomon: Your Limp Wrist cast series also represents how a singular experience can be displayed alongside other singular experiences in order to form a collective, quotidian pattern of bullying and homophobic violence. The wrist cast pieces were featured in an early show of yours under the title “Closeted.” One of the most striking casts is from the subject “David” whose brother told him that he was “worthless.” Others in the series feature similarly jarring language “sharpied” on the cast. Can you describe how you curate the pieces in this ongoing series and how they work in your exploration of the closet?

Lawson: Yeah, the Limp Wrist pieces were probably the most successful works I did as an undergraduate at UCF. In an attempt to reach out to other queer people and form a community, I started taking on participants within my work, trying to figure out how I could mesh my historical references with theirs, and how each of us could independently grow from the process. The Limp Wrists began as a way for us to explore the role of language in making queer people understand our worth as perceived from a member of the straight majority. The written content on each cast represents the most memorable moment when the subject felt someone they loved “drew blood,” or tried to wound them with words that targeted their perceived difference. As such, each cast also features a drop of the subject’s blood to illustrate queer resilience: that we can be wounded to the point of needing a cast, but if we keep going we can become stronger. For example, on my cast I quote my grandpa who I overheard talk about the “nasty shit” on TV, by which he meant gay stuff. That moment made me understand how he perceived queer people, even the one who sat in the room with him and shared his blood. It’s about what we LGBTQ+ folk endure when we are still in the closet to those around us or even to ourselves. We put up with a lot of casual verbal violence even from our kinfolk.

I thought a lot about language and go back to Merle Miller, “it’s not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it’s words that break your bones.” In Limp Wrists, I wanted a way to express how much of what we hear around the thanksgiving table, in front of the TV, in church sermons, and with our “friends” is internalized and becomes a brutal reminder of our social status. It’s a common experience of most queer people I’ve asked. There is always a moment, something that is said either to them or unknowingly about them, that changes their perception of their self-worth. Sometimes it’s from the people we least expect, which is often the most damaging. I hope that one day I’ll run out of arms to cast, but I think these pieces are important to illustrate our queer resilience. I was inspired to create the form of a cast and “sign” it in blood after reading the Queer Nation manifesto, which was handed out by ACT UP at the New York Pride Parade in 1990:

“How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother; sister that your life is in danger. That everyday [sic] you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary. There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence. It is a miracle you are standing here reading these words. You should by all rights be dead.”

Better Blood Memories

Solomon: I wanted to ask you about family—brothers and sisters—not so much your own family background but how you think about the queer kin with whom you share artistic DNA, if that makes sense. I can look at your work and see so many possible influences. First, how would you describe yourself as an artist? How do you think about your work at this stage in your career as fitting within a certain tradition?

Lawson: I’d say my art begins with a clear sense of concept that then shapes the form of the installations, something akin but not limited to the post-minimalist school of sculptural thought. I don’t have a concrete or specific school of thought surrounding what I do in my practice, but if I were to describe myself it would be an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. I would consider myself more of a sculptor. Two-dimension has slipped my repertoire of talent.

In terms of contemporary influences, I look a lot at Jordan Eagles, a California artist who works a lot with blood and did pieces in the Keith Herring museum. His Blood Mirror is probably one of my favorite pieces. I know I mimic a lot of his thought process and artistic instincts in my own work. Ai Weiwei is another artist who’s driven me to more of an activist place in my work. I’ve been talking with social justice professionals about how what I create are not just objects but have a more tangible function as reflective pieces for social change or disruption. Otherwise, I feel like I’m making the work just for myself, which isn’t the purpose of what I do.

Solomon: Yes, I can see Jordan Eagles for sure in your work. Part of the way my mind works is through connection: always seeing references and ways to synthesize because I think all works of art are ultimately in conversation with other works of art, and we scholars tease out those connections in writing about them. That intricate weaving is something a writer I admire, the late Douglas Crimp, does wonderfully.⁴Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). In viewing your work specifically as a queer viewer, I also see traces of many other artists I love. Speaking of Eagles and blood mirrors and a desire for the work to have more purposeful connection, your use of blood as artistic material fits within a certain queer artistic tradition. One of my favorite artists is David Wojnarowicz; he fuses image and text in a way that is perhaps comparable to you as well. I teach portions of his memoir Close to the Knives, and it’s always eye-opening for students. In one of his final artworks before he died of AIDS complications, he superimposes writing over a photograph of human remains. Part of it reads, “If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would… It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss.”⁵David Breslin and David Kiehl, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 270–271. I can see this sense of connection through loss in your return to shared LGBTQ+ traumas throughout your work. Your use of blood also seems to echo the subversive political aims of Félix González-Torres, whose work was interactive, conceptual, three-dimensional and often deceptively political. His 1991 billboard depicting an empty unmade double bed with imprints remining on the pillows, produced a year after he lost his lover Ross to AIDS, makes a powerful political statement. He writes, “It was ruled that the bed is the site where we are not only born, where we die, where we make love, but it is also a place where the state has a pressing interest, a public interest.”⁶Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Practices: the Problem of Divisions of Cultural Labour,” Art and Design 9 (1994): 91. See Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London: I.B. Tauris, 20017). Despite the power of the imprint, Ross is no longer in that bed with Felix. However, the state, following the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision, remains obliquely in that bed.

Your blood works provide a ruminative and reflective political ethic similar to González-Torres. When you see the blood in your work, you do not initially know from whom the blood flowed just as you cannot discern immediately from González-Torres’s work who once occupied that bed. And you’re making a statement about the state’s continued role in regulating a particular population’s ability to donate blood.

Do you think about the history of negative connotations associated with queer blood, which stems largely from that “time of so much loss” in the 1980s–1990s, when you and I were born, during the artistic generation of Wojnarowicz and González-Torres and Herring, who you mentioned earlier? How intentionally political are these blood works for you?

Forrest: You’re right. At this point, blood has become a universal instrument or material in my work. My first projects with blood, O-Negative and Better Blood, were to expose the discriminatory FDA blood ban that I think is an unnecessary and dangerous holdover from the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I had thirty gay participants donate a slide of their blood and I made a book alongside that blood that had the FDA questionnaire that excluded gay men from donating. From there, I shifted to blood prints and blood slides in Biohazard and my current project What Are We to You. In all of this, I’m working with abjection and aesthetics, bringing the disgusting and gross into a beautiful shape and environment. It works well in a vein of subterfuge in that people get really close to it and often not until they read the fine print or the title tag do they realize that they are that much closer to queer blood. It makes people really confront very quickly their own bias and stigma. What does queer blood actually mean? What does anyone’s blood actually signify, for you, the viewer, standing this close to many other people’s blood who just so happen to be gay or bi or lesbian or trans (which you only know if you read the fine print)? Generally, I use blood as a means to impart our shared humanity while politically invoking the FDA ban, the legacy of HIV/AIDS, and the still-common association of queer blood with the infectious and the contagious in the minds of many viewers. I’ve tried hard not to use blood in any shock value way or as a way to jar people. The goal has been one of enlightenment, of introspection, of recognition, and in some sense, of communion with those who’ve gone before who were gone too soon. To memorialize.

Solomon: Yes, it’s a kind of blood memory like the Rilke quote: not until the memories have turned to blood within us can we understand them. Something like that.⁷For the connection between Rilke and González-Torres’s work, see Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, “Remembering a New Queer Politics: Ideals in the Aftermath of Identity,” If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 175–215. The full and correct Rainer Marie Rilke quote: “And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.” I go back to the inheritance of loss we all live with as gay men. I do think those years of loss are in the DNA of who we are, of how we navigate the world. How we remember and honor those who died. How the pain of the past can be instructive for our present. It’s contemplative, but I wouldn’t say your use of blood is shocking. My friend Jesse Peel describes a moment after his 1987 HIV positive diagnosis when he cut his finger and realized the blood which pooled in the cut “was poison.” He states frankly, “that’s a real mind fuck."⁸See the Touching Up Our Roots oral history about his life: In the Eye of the AIDS Storm: The Saga of Dr. Jesse Peel, directed and produced by Dave Hayward (2010), DVD. Touching Up Our Roots: Georgia's LGBT History Project. Georgia State University. Jesse Peel’s realization is shocking! But Forrest, I don’t find your use of blood shocking at all. Is it a “mind fuck”? Perhaps. Because you are asking reflective, metacognitive questions of your viewer. But the way you use the material of blood is so precise, ordered, neat, adding a degree of symmetric beauty to what some may view as the materially abject. There’s something about using a substance that has been historically vilified as infectious, as less-than, as something that needs to be quarantined and cured, there’s something about taking a substance that has that much chaotic weight historically and then shifting it into a register of order where you put the interpretive onus on the viewer not on the person from whom the blood came. It’s powerful re-signification. How are you thinking about your queer bloodwork and the revision of the FDA blood ban in the context of COVID-19?

Lawson: It’s really important to what I’ve been doing recently. Before this, I had actually started a national campaign with a professor of social work at UGA, Dr. Jeremy Gibbs, in order to help end the ban or remove the restrictions to something a lot more reasonable. And then, of course, this whole pandemic happened, and we get immense pressure that helps reduce the ban to three months, which is still absurd. It’s an ongoing debate that I’m sure will continue to inform my art.

Solomon: And I think that’s part of the ethic of your artwork, to quote González-Torres again: “I do have a political and personal agenda with this work, and in a way they are very interrelated.”⁹Felix González-Torres, interview by Tim Rollins, Between Artists: Twelve Contemporary American Artists Interview Twelve Contemporary American Artists (New York: A.R.T. Press, 1996), 94.

Lawson: Absolutely. As I say in my artist statement: “Through sculpture and assemblage, my work explores the array of complexities experienced by individuals within the gay community.” It’s both me and the collective; the personal and political are inseparable. Although lately, I’ve been moving more towards a research-based artistic practice, whereas before I would’ve considered my work more emotionally driven, more instinctually responsive to what I was personally living through or seeing around me with my own experience and those of the small community I had in Fort Myers, then Orlando, and now Athens. Since winning ArtFields in 2019, I’m working now on a more national scale, for example, by reaching out to networks of reparative therapy survivors to try to describe a queer experience that I have neither lived nor am fully familiar with.

Solomon: I see that in some of the work you’re sketching during the current pandemic too: that reaching out. How do you connect in pandemic times when connection may lead to death?

Beyond advocacy for abolishing the blood ban and the material conditions of producing and exhibiting the work, which I know have been challenging if not impossible right now, can you say a bit about the ways the current COVID-19 situation has impacted the focus of your work?

Lawson: Much of my sketching and idea invention lately has me thinking a lot about how the current “quarantine” and our experiences self-isolating as a parallel not only to the HIV/AIDS pandemic but also, for those of us who are well and isolated, to the queer experience as a whole, within the closet and beyond. I’ve started this book series. I’m trying to gather narratives of people’s experiences within the closet and to understand how that particular experience may or may not mirror the kind of isolation we are in now, where we are having to sacrifice parts of ourselves and experiences in order to survive in the world. And I envision this project, like the ones I’ve done so far, will bring a sense of recognition through reflection to those who are losing their minds right now who have never experienced this degree of isolation or loneliness before, things that many queer people have been and continue to be all too familiar with, unfortunately so, day to day as many of us have to navigate a culture that devalues and misunderstands us, sometimes with tragic consequences. I’m also thinking a lot about queer people who are isolated in neither ideal nor safe settings, and I don’t know best yet how to communicate with them. But I do want the work to amplify their voices and experiences. The biggest thing I’d like to accomplish in this newer work is creating that sense of shared experience that represents the full spectrum of affective response such “physically distant” experience elicits for us all, gesturing towards some empathy and understanding. Empathy is perhaps the direction I’m headed most of all: what is it like to walk in the shoes of others? What is it like to understand the microaggressions queer people experience if you yourself have not lived them because of who you are? What is it like to experience loneliness in isolation for the first time? Those are some of the questions I’m exploring and finding shape for.

Solomon: Shared traumatic experiences (bullying, homophobic violence, blood bans) have been the organizing principle of your art up to this point. Have you considered adding other dimensions to your work, different layers of queer affective experience?

Lawson: For sure, I’m trying to shift the mindset in order to shift the art as well. I’m working with game pieces and queer-themed board games as an attempt to play off the trope of queer missed childhoods and return to a sense of playful erotic creative whimsy that we as adult gay men can celebrate without shame or the watchful eyes of judgmental figures. I’m trying to blend the happy with the sad as best I can.

Solomon: It reminds me of “Joy” and “Sadness” in the Pixar film Inside Out. So you’re expanding perhaps the rooms that we’re able to take up, as you mentioned earlier? And I’ve been thinking about that phrase because it struck me so. There’s a passivity to the way you construct that phrase, right: “the rooms that we’re able to take up.” In the passive construction of the phrase, there’s a certain admission of powerlessness.

Lawson: Yeah, and I guess I want to take more of an active control of the narratives I’m crafting with my art, ones that aren’t purely reactionary. Right now I’m shifting in my work to attempt to find methods and forms that celebrate sexuality so as not to exclusively talk about trauma. It’s a reorientation that I’m working through right now. How, for instance, can we build a life against the backdrop of trauma that is still profoundly rooted in joy, in hope, in love, in intimacy? How can art represent the affective register of queer happiness? How can we have the whole emotional house and not just the one sad room? So now I’m stuck in that research mode trying to give those ideas more tangible rooting in my work. I’m looking a lot at queer theory right now, and I’m trying to navigate how best to talk about queer experiences without imparting a sense of total authority on the subject. How are we oriented towards our work? That’s one area of queer theory building off Sara Ahmed’s work Queer Phenomenology that I’ve been thinking through. How am I approaching the work and the themes my work has always been about? How am I “oriented” towards trauma and what “turnings” occur for others to become a part of the work? I know for eight years now my work has been primarily about homophobic experiences—those shared traumas that we as LGBTQ+ folk unfortunately know too closely and the inherited generational trauma that we still encounter from our shared past.

Solomon: And in that reorientation that you’re working through, I know sexuality is making a kind of resurgence in your work.

Lawson: Absolutely. I avoided sexuality for a long time mostly because I had done work in my undergraduate studies that was censored. They were taken out of the gallery setting. I was instructed by one of my mentors that if I ever wanted to establish myself as an emerging artist and make my work pass through that veil I should avoid explicitly carnal and sexual artwork. And I did. But it’s always been an undercurrent. As I said, I started my art as a young person drawing very erotic imagery, and I’m still to this day just drawing penises everywhere, which is both a return to the erotic in my art and that spirit of play and joy that I’m seeking more of in the work lately. And the game pieces are really about the celebration of sex and sexuality—

Solomon: The Joy of Gay Sex if you will.

Lawson: Yeah! I’ve made these BDSM themed playing cards, and I’m redoing the game Operation in a sex-toy setting. One piece I’m working on now, “The Hedonist’s Closet,” is all about the pursuit of pleasure on hookup apps. I don’t think I avoid sexuality anymore perhaps like I did when I was younger in my work. I certainly don’t do it personally! But within the work, I was always afraid that to be in a gallery setting and have some sort of success that there were certain subjects that were still very taboo. That’s really the direction my work is headed now—still very body centered—but joy, pleasure, sex, life, you know all the “simple” stuff. [Laughs]

Pulse: Remembering the 49

     Queerly beloved,
     we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life
     our story stretched across bloodlines, backrooms, and borderlines 
     . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
     We're tired of being so resilient. 
     Pero, love beats here.

     —Maya Chinchilla, “Church at Night”10Maya Chinchilla, “Church at Night,” GLQ 24, no. 1 (2018), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4254387.

Solomon: I thought we’d end with a benediction of sorts by considering your works surrounding the Pulse nightclub shooting. I believe your 6/12/2016 piece was how I first encountered your work. This work resonates so deeply with so many of us. In “Church at Night,” Maya Chinchilla responds to the Pulse shooting, asking readers: “Do you remember the names/ of your first gay bar?” I already know the answer to this, but Forrest, what was your first gay bar?

Lawson: It was Pulse. Although I was closeted until I graduated high school, I was with the man who would become my husband for three years prior to that. As awful as it sounds, we maintained staying in the closet for the sake of our own growth and our own safety back in Fort Myers. Once we got of age and were able to go to nightlife situations, we were able to find more of a community then, but that really only happened after I graduated and was able to move up to Orlando, which is a mostly progressive, liberal, open place where I felt a lot more comfortable. I think a lot of queer people did up until Pulse happened… Orlando was one of the first places in Florida to offer employment and family protections, housing initiatives for homeless LGBTQ+ children (Zebra Coalition, The Center), and a vast number of out and proud queer people. It is still, however, the South, and as much as it appears the queer population is thriving, Florida still has a long way to go. It is still home to churches that host “Make America Straight Again” rallies, pastors who call for government eradication of all queer people, and the Pulse tragedy.

Yes, Pulse was the first nightclub that I went to, but there were many other queer spaces I started to navigate as a terrified nineteen-year-old child trying to explore a more “urban” terrain of queer life. Starting my queer artistic journey in Orlando really helped me understand my place within an intersectional community. Race, gender identity, class, faith-based queer groups, I was able to navigate all of that as I came into myself and into my work. And in many ways, my early twenties in Orlando felt like a replacement for the childhood I feel like I missed out on, in the sense of coming to terms with my sexuality. My twenties sort of acted as my teens, much to my detriment I’m sure…

Solomon: … I wouldn’t say that. I think that’s a fairly common experience that often serves as a misguided stereotype of gay experience: the "lost boy" trope, the boy who couldn’t or wouldn’t grow up, when those who traffic in such rhetoric fail to understand the reasons that might motivate queer people to have such a “delayed adolescence.” And yet, Forrest, it seems to me your life thus far has an element to it that subverts so many expectations: you’ve been together with your husband for a long time!

Lawson: Yeah, since we were fifteen years old, so fourteen years now. We got married in 2016, the year after it became legal. The year Pulse happened. We were in Orlando during Pulse, and that moment served as a catalyst for so much of my professional and personal life. I specifically reference the Pulse tragedy in my work with the number 49. A lot of my work features the multiplicity of that number. The blood slide pieces in What are We to You, for example, each contain 49 petri dishes of blood spots. I’ve done other projects such as the wrist band pieces in the 6/12/2016 series, which feature interviews I conducted with 49 people who give their narrative reactions to Pulse and their reactions to Pulse no longer being a safe, queer space. And then I included those reactions within a memorial box alongside one wrist band and one name of a person lost that day in June 2016. Pulse is a place that has a ghostly presence in everything I do.

Solomon: Some of the written text within one of the memorial boxes reads, “It was weird that life didn't pause or slow. That I had to get up. Go to work. Where dreams come true. And fake a smile. Pretend that forty-nine people weren't just shot.” In your display, this text is positioned between boxes honoring the young lovers Christopher Andrew “Drew” Leinonen and Juan Guerrero, a thirty-two-year-old man and twenty-two-year-old man who were both celebrating June Birthdays and who died together at Pulse. Many of us witnessed Drew's mother Christine Leinonen's public grief in the aftermath. I can still remember waking up that day to the news, seeing her tears not knowing where her son was. It's become memory in the blood at this point, deep in the marrow. And I can't help but think about how Drew and Juan and so many of those lost were our contemporaries. How you and your husband live, how I live, and they do not. And I think that's such a surreal recognition when we encounter loss: how random it seems that some die while we live.

Lawson: It is surreal. But I suppose that’s the purpose of art, right? We make and create. We keep them alive in the objects we craft to remember them. Four years later, we continue to honor them.

About the Authors

Forrest Lawson is an Orlando-based multimedia sculptor. He is best known for his assemblages dealing with issues presented within the LGBTQ+ community. Growing up in Florida, he blends the experience of southern conservative living with his experience as a gay man. He is a MFA student in Sculpture and Fine Arts at the University of Georgia and has a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of Central Florida. He received the Grand Prize of ArtFields in Lake City, South Carolina, in 2019.

Eric Solomon earned his doctorate in English from Emory University and is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi. His work is featured in Southern Spaces, south, PopMatters, and Mississippi Quarterly.

Presentation

About the Author

John Howard is Emeritus Professor of Arts and Humanities at King's College London. He is interested in the historical production of human differences and their attendant inequalities. His work also assesses differences as productive mechanisms of affiliation, identity, coalition, and struggle. Informed by queer, feminist, materialist, critical race, and spatial theory, his research and teaching are engaged primarily with the categories we now know as sexuality, gender, class, race, and region. He is the author of Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Presentation

Part One

Black women who influenced Johnson's thinking about literature, folklore, the arts, and "quare theory" while growing up in western North Carolina and when attending UNC–Chapel Hill (5:27).

Part Two

Johnson's approach to interviewing and transcribing, selecting and editing narratives for print publication, and recording stories of everyday sexual violence (14:49).

Part Three

What most surprised him in the oral history interviews for the book? Themes of spirituality, sexual fluidity, nomenclature, and queerness (9:08).

Part Four

Johnson acknowledges several women in his oral history project who have helped build networks of activism and care (13:40).

Part Five

Bridgforth on growing up in Los Angeles, raised by people from Memphis, and New Orleans, listening to stories, and writing to understand herself and to survive (7:28).

Question and Answer Session

About the Speakers

E. Patrick Johnson is a scholar, artist, and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of African American Studies and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Johnson performs nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Sharon Bridgforth is a writer and activist, and a recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. A self-employed touring artist since 1998, Bridgforth has received support from Creative Capital, the MAP Fund, and the National Performance Network. Bridgforth's publications include love conjure/blues (Washington, DC: Redbone Press, 2004) and the Lambda Literary Award-winning the bull-jean stories (Washington, DC: Redbone Press, 1998). Bridgforth is also the producer and host of the podcast series Who Yo People Is.

Introduction by Katherine Jentleson

During the summer of 2018, Atlanta's High Museum of Art hosted Outliers and American Vanguard Art, an exhibition that demonstrated how self-taught artists have been major contributors to the development of modern and contemporary art over the last century. One of the most popular galleries in Outliers contained a vast open installation that considered the influences of textile and craft-based practices upon generations of painters and sculptors. By mixing quilts by Mary Lee Bendolph and Annie Mae Young of the Gee's Bend Quilting Collective, and the West Coast quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins, with paintings by avant-garde artists such as Al Loving, Mary Heilmann and Howardena Pindell, Outliers emphasized the formative influence that quilts had on artists working in New York in the 1970s, thanks in part to a 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Abstract Design in American Quilts, that put historical quilts in conversation with twentieth century abstraction.

As the Outliers exhibition brought quilts to Atlanta, there was also an incredible quilt-celebrating show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift. In addition to monumental works by artists such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter, the exhibition featured eighteen quilts by Gee's Bend, Alabama, artists including Loretta Pettway and Emma Lee Pettway Campbell that are now part of the museum's collection. Outliers, History Refused to Die, and the High's newly reopened permanent collection galleries, which demonstrate the museum's commitment to collecting and showing more quilts, are all proof of how, despite their long history of being pigeonholed and neglected, quilts have become significant objects in US art museums.

Convened at the High Museum during the final weeks of Outliers, this "Quilting Conversations" panel invited individuals chosen not only for their personal achievements, but also for the variety of relationships to quilting that they each represent. These panelists took the stage and offered their perspectives on the past, present, and future of quilts and quilting.

Marquetta Johnson

Marquetta Johnson, fourth-generation quilter and textile artist, discusses how her quilting techniques have developed over a lifetime, and how she uses her creativity to inspire new generations of quilters, students, and activists.

Michael Moon

Michael Moon considers quilts as kōans ("What is this?") and, with several vivid examples, ponders the intense emotional power and spiritual force that includes, but goes beyond, quilts' visual appeal.

Mary Margaret Pettway

Fourth-generation quilter Mary Margaret Pettway discusses a variety of quilts she has made during her life in Gee's Bend, Alabama. "The mind of a quilter," she says, "is a twisted thing."

Erin Jane Nelson

Erin Jane Nelson puts quilts "into new situations" in her own work by combining traditional methods with inspirations and techniques drawn from contemporary art scenes and movements.

About the Speakers

Katherine Jentleson is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at Atlanta's High Museum of Art. She previously worked as an arts journalist in New York and received her PhD from the department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, specializing in the art of the United States, with an emphasis on the interwar period.

Marquetta Johnson is a self-taught artist and fourth-generation quilter, known for using innovative hand-dyeing techniques. Her work is represented by Mason Murer Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, and is in many private and corporate collections (Mr. and Mrs. Bernie Marcus of Atlanta, the Coca Cola Corporation, and the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport). She is a teaching artist affiliated with the High Museum, VSA arts of Georgia, the Atlanta Partnership for the Arts in Learning, and the NAMES Project Foundation.

Michael Moon is a professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. In addition to LGBT studies and queer theory, Moon's research concerns modern literature, literary theory, media and mass culture, with a particular emphasis on the cultural production of "outsider" communities. His two most reecent books are Darger's Resources (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) and Arabian Nights (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016).  

Mary Margaret Pettway is a fourth-generation quilter and member of Gee's Bend Quilt Collective. She is the new Board Chair for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and a 2018 Fellow of the Alabama Humanities Foundation.

Erin Jane Nelson is the executive director of the digital magazine BURNAWAY. She previously worked as curatorial assistant in Photography and Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum and managed web design, publications, and other media initiatives at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. She is an actively exhibiting artist, having recently shown her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Atlanta Contemporary.

Presentation

Responses

About the Speakers

Kirk Savage is a professor of art history and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written extensively on public monuments within the theoretical context of collective memory and identity. He is the author of Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Andra Gillespie is an associate professor of political science at Emory University. Gillespie, who studies racial and ethnic politics in the United States, is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

Daniel A. Pollock, a longtime resident of Atlanta, is author of the project "The Battle of Atlanta: History and Remembrance."

Presentation

Closer Reading: Three Images from the Presentation

Standing at the summit of Signal Hill (used previously by the Spanish military for the transmission of communications), Armstrong figuratively dominates the landscape by sweeping his arms over the mountains. Later he inscribes relevant cartographical information on this photographic image. Armstrong's presence reinforced the intentions of US colonial dominion over Puerto Rico while his panoramic gaze helped create the knowledge that made it possible. He repeats this pose in other photographs, sometimes appearing repeatedly in the same panorama (a result of pasting adjacent views together) and multiplying his gaze indefinitely.

This interior photograph shows a sick "peon" in the presence of an unknown observer, who does not resemble Armstrong in appearance or dress. Anemia caused by hookworm decimated Puerto Rican rural workers. After the discoveries of Dr. Bailey Ashford, an effective clinical treatment became available in 1904.¹For more on Ashford and hookworm eradication, see José Amador, "The Pursuit of Health: Colonialism and Hookworm Eradication in Puerto Rico," Southern Spaces, March 30, 2017, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2017/pursuit-health-colonialism-and-hookworm-eradication-puerto-rico. This photograph from 1910 suggests the continuing misery of rural workers under the colonial state. The observer appears detached from and indifferent to the suffering of the hunched, dying man. Armstrong, in an ominous field book note, suggested that in the on-going process of "Americanization" it might be better if the unfit inhabitants simply "died off."

Armstrong produced extensive cartographic materials on his journeys through Puerto Rico from 1908 to 1912. In the process of making a topographical map, Armstrong traced elaborate itineraries, which he organized in field books complete with descriptions and maps of more than thirty towns and illustrated with more than five-hundred annotated photographs and postcards. He also included visual details of the transportation networks of primary and secondary roads, local trails, and railroads, as well as the agricultural environs. The archival research (upon which this illustrated lecture relies) includes a biography of Armstrong, an analysis of the contents of the field books, and discussion of the effects of the map in the context of the colonial state. The final publication will be a facsimile edition of ten field books, a Spanish translation, and a digital version of the topographical map.

Acknowledgments

This project is funded by the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. All images and quotes are from the original field books, which are located in the following archives and collections: Colección Puertorriqueña, Biblioteca José M. Lázaro, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; Archivo General de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Colección de Héctor Rodríguez Vázquez.

About the Author

Lanny Thompson is a professor of sociology at Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. He is the author of Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2010).

Presentation

Question and Answer Session

About the Speaker

S. Wright Kennedy is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Rice University. His primary area of interest is the integration of spatial perspectives into the study of nineteenth-century US health and economics history. Kennedy is the lead investigator of the New Orleans Mortality Project, and from 2012 to 2015 he served as the project manager for the imagineRio project at Rice University.