Dr. Rose Stremlau is an Associate Professor of History at Davidson College specializing in the study of the Indigenous South; American Indian women, gender, and sexualities; families and kinship; federal Indian policy; and sexual violence in American History. Her book Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation, was published by the University of North Carolina Press and won the 2012 Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women’s Historians.
Dr. Stremlau has kindly provided a reading list in conjunction with Nicholas Galanin’s exhibit Dreaming in English. The readings provide historical background and context to many of the pieces and provide further information on the topic of forced removal and relocation of Indigenous children from the reservation into residential “schools” the focus of Galanin’s participatory installation within the exhibition. She has categorized the readings into five groups.
Boarding schools:
In the context of the relocation of indigenous children, boarding schools were in fact forced residential schools. These so-called “schools” functioned not with the intent of education but instead with the much more insidious purpose of assimilation and the eradication of both culture and spirit.
Education for Extinction by David Wallace Adams
Boarding School Seasons by Brenda J. Child
Away From Home by Lomawaima
Objects of Survivance by Cameron, Grey
Returning Home by Farina Noelani King
Tlingit/Alaska Native:
These books connect to Nicholas Galanin’s background as a Tlingit/Unangax artist.
Alaska Native Reader by Williams, et al
Living Our Cultures by Crowell, et al
Indian removal:
The removal of Indigenous people from reservations into residential “schools” is central to Galanin’s artwork in this show.
The Cherokee Removal by Perdue and Green
Monuments to Absence by Denson
Rivers of Sand by Haveman
Surviving Genocide by Ostler
Andrew Jackson administration:
Andrew Jackson is a central figure in Galanin’s installation Unshadowed Land in which the shadow of the monument to Andrew Jackson currently standing at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C will be cut into the ground next to the Visual Art Center. Andrew Jackson is also the US president most associated with settler colonialism in the Native South.
The Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saun
the Legal Ideology of Removal by Garrison, Tim Allen
Catawba Indian nation:
Davidson College is built on Catawba’s ancestral land. In the second phase of the installation Unshadowed Land, the Davidson community will together along with citizens of the Catawba Indian Nation to plant corn in the silhouette of the installation.
The Indians New World by Merrell
The Catawba Indian Nation by Blumer
Catawba Indian Pottery by Blumer
Who Belongs? by Adams