On February 24 at 7 pm Bidwell House presents the last of three Zoom lectures in the off-season series Hidden in Plain Sight: Native Peoples and the Struggle to Recover Their History in New England. Though the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans were forced to leave their homelands in 1783, they have never relinquished their ties to the Mahicannituck River Valley and have continued to return to this region over the last 238 years. In this talk, Dr. Rose Miron discusses the heritage tourism trips organized by the tribe’s Historical Committee in the late 20th century, which brought busloads of tribal citizens back to the Northeast to learn about Mohican history. The trips allowed tribal citizens to recreate the geographies in which their ancestors lived and cultivate new collective memories that strengthened a shared sense of tribal history, laying the foundation for future interventions in regional museums and other public history sites.
Rose Miron is the Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She holds a BA in History with a minor in Spanish and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her research explores Indigenous interventions in public history within the Northeast and the Great Lakes regions, as well as American Indian sovereignty and activism in the twentieth century. She is currently working on a manuscript project tentatively titled “Indigenous Archival Activism: Reclaiming Native History in the Mohican Tribal Archive and Beyond.” The project is based in close collaboration with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation since 2011 and explores how Native people use archives to change the way Indigenous history is accessed and produced.
The lecture will be held via Zoom. Registration via the Museum event page, https://www.bidwellhousemuseum.org/event/cultivating-memorial-geographies-and-collective-memories/ is required and the Zoom details for the event will be sent to you via email a few days in advance.
The Bidwell House Museum grounds—192 acres of woods, fields, historic stonewalls, self-guided trails and picnic sites—are open every day, dawn until dusk, free of charge. The program of events can be found on the museum’s website: www.bidwellhousemuseum.org.