Digital Native American and Indigenous Studies Workshops

The Digital Native American Studies Project proposes to offer three three-day workshops that will educate participants on issues of digital humanities research and methodology in the context of Native American Studies. Native American Studies, an interdisciplinary field of study exploring the history, culture, politics, issues, and contemporary experience of indigenous peoples of America, intersects with a number of issues related to access, preservation, and methodology that are problematized through the development and deployment of digital tools and methods and the conduct of digital research. These workshops seek to pay attention to the ways in which digital objects, practices, and methods function within Native communities and through Native American Studies scholarship.

Where and When

Our tentative schedule is as follows:

Workshop 1: June 29 - July 1, 2016 at Yale University, New Haven, CT.  Deadline for applications for workshop 1 is May 10, 2015.

Workshop 2: Fall 2016, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ

Workshop 3:  Spring 2017, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN

Who should apply?

DNAIS seeks to support the broad community engaged in Native American studies, a community that includes:

• Tribal Community members working with issues around digital research, preservation, and access
• Academics from the disciplines of anthropology, archeology, philosophy, history, literature, new media, & museum studies
• Librarians
• Information scientists
• Cultural Heritage professionals from Galleries, Archives, and Museums

Interested parties should apply to the workshop making sure to note the following content concentrations:

• Workshop one, hosted by the Yale Indian Papers, will focus on issues of access, preservation, and methodology related to the use of digitized cultural heritage materials in the context of tribal communities and cultures from the territories east of the Mississippi River.

• Workshop two, hosted by Northern Arizona University, will focus on issues of access, preservation, and methodology related to the use of digitized cultural heritage materials in the context of tribal communities and cultures located west of the Mississippi River. 

• Workshop three, hosted by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, will focus on issues of pedagogy and the application of Digital Native Studies research and method in the undergraduate, graduate, and extracurricular classrooms regardless of geographical context. 

Limited funding will be available to offset the cost of attending the institute workshops, thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This funding will be awarded based on need. Subvention of travel and lodging costs will be handled pre-payment of flights and hotels. Parking, rail and car travel costs will be handled via reimbursement.

Partners

This important project is a partnership of the American Indian Program-Native American Studies and the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the Yale Indian Papers Project, and the Department of Anthropology and the Hopi Iconography Project at Northern Arizona University.

DNAIS is led by Jennifer Guiliano, Charmayne “Charli” Champion-Shaw, Holly Cusack-McVeigh, Larry Zimmerman, and Mary Cox (IUPUI), in consultations with Carrie Heitman (University of Nebraska Lincoln), Siobhan Senier (University of New Hampshire), and Joshua J. Wells (Indiana University South Bend).

We are proudly joined by supporters and confirmed presenters: Michael Ashley and Kim Christen-Withey (Murkutu Project), James Eric Frances (Tribal Historian and Director for the Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department), Paul Grant-Costa (Yale Indian Papers Project), Kelley Hayes-Gilpin (Curator, Museum of Northern Arizona), Donald Soctomah (Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Passamaquoddy Tribe), and Loren M. Spears (Executive Director, Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum).