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.
(RE)MAKING THE ADIRONDACKS THROUGH CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Nearly two centuries ago, poets, painters and geologists invented the idea of the “Adirondacks.” This creative place-making helped ensure that this land would remain “forever wild,” but this work also elevated ideas of white supremacy over the land while simultaneously erasing more than 10,000 years of Indigenous presence within their ancestral homelands. Join historian Dr. Loren Michael Mortimer for an immersive place-based workshop at Craigardan that invites writers, podcasters, and storytellers of all kinds to return to these Romantic-era narratives of the Adirondacks to harness the transformative power of creative non-fiction to address the legacies of colonialism in the region while also writing new futures into existence.
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.