History + makers (3 part series)
Creativity meets inquiry in this place-based history series. As an organization deeply rooted in this region’s unique history, Craigardan exists at the nexus of processes (re)making this region’s present and future. Through multidisciplinary and multisensory encounters with the past, participants will experience history as a creative yet collaborative catalyst for positive change in our own lives, our organizations, and the communities that sustain us.
First OBLIGATIONS
While the Adirondack region has a continuous history as Native American homeland extending back at least 12,000 years, most of the 12.5 million people who reside in or visit each year are not Indigenous to these lands and waters. As non-Native guests on ancestral Indigenous land, what are our obligations to its original caretakers? How might early treaties with Native Americans and the “original instructions” for coexisting on the land guide us through these spaces in the present day?
Join Dr. Loren Michael Mortimer for an introduction to the treaties and trickeries that transformed Native American homelands into the Adirondack Park during the 18th and 19th centuries. Even though past generations have disregarded or broken treaty agreements, this course challenges participants to re-engage these foundational documents as frameworks for relational accountability with Native American communities that maintain intimate connections with the lands and waterways within the boundaries of the Adirondack Park.
Location: Main Campus. Look for Craigardan Event sign at the end of Main Campus driveway (two “doors” west of the farm store, towards Keene).
Registration
6-8pm // $20 per person
Loren Michael Mortimer is a 2023 Teaching Fellow. Mike holds the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Native American History at Emory University. A public scholar, digital humanist, and interdisciplinary historian, Mike has devoted his career to training creative history-makers to address global challenges at a local level. He received his PhD in History with a designated emphasis in Native American Studies from UC Davis in 2019. From 2020-2021, he was the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Race, Migration, and Indigeneity at Indiana University Bloomington. As a community-engaged scholar, he has worked on collaborative digital mapping workshops on local Indigenous foodways for Hamilton College.
His current book project, Kaniatarowanenneh Crossings: Indigenous Power and Presence in the St. Lawrence River Watershed, 1534-1842, is the first transnational study of the Seven Fires — a confederacy of Catholic Mohawk, Wendat, Wabanaki, and Anishinaabe mission communities along the US-Canada border that had shared ties to the lands and waters that now comprise the Adirondack Park. As an expert in the Indigenous and environmental history of the Adirondack Park, Mike’s research has been recognized by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, while his digital history projects have received support from Mellon Public Scholars and the American Philosophical Society.