Picturing Native Americans in the Landscape

Dr. Scott Manning Stevens, a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk nation, Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies and English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University and director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program; and Alan Michelson, Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, internationally recognized artist, curator, and writer, will discuss the literal and metaphorical cycles of nature exemplified by the enduring presence and attempted erasure of Native Americans from the American landscape.

Dr. Scott Manning Stevens and Alan Michelson will look at the Native American heritage of the Hudson River Valley and the evolving attitudes of Europeans, who have used its iconography for their own purposes. Indigenous peoples, its original inhabitants, were forcibly displaced and rendered invisible; now we honor their continued presence and their integral place in our history and culture. Through this lens, we’ll learn about the changing and conflicting attitudes toward the Indigenous population of the American continents and the artistic imagination, and about our own relationship to the environment and our place in it today. Presented during National Native American Heritage Month, this promises to be an important conversation about the place of Native Americans in the Hudson River landscape and in our contemporary consciousness.

Support provided by Art Bridges.

Sponsor Message