At Length with Steve Scher

At Length with K. Tsianina Lomawaima

Prior to her Equity & Difference  lecture,  More Than Mascots! Less Than Citizens? American Indians Talk: Why Isn’t the U.S. Listening?, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, sat down for a conversation with At Length host Steve Scher, ’87.

Recorded on Feb. 10, 2016.

Poster from the Winter 2016 Equity & Difference lecture series. Click to enlarge.

K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Mvskoke/Creek Nation of Eastern Oklahoma, not enrolled) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work straddles Indigenous Studies, anthropology, education, ethnohistory, history, legal analysis and political science. She focuses on the early 20th century, examining the “footprint” of federal Indian policy and practice in Indian country. Her research on the federal off-reservation boarding school system is rooted in the experiences of her father, Curtis Thorpe Carr, who at age 9 arrived at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma. Some of her recent work focuses on early 20th century debates over the status of Native individuals and nations, and the ways U.S. citizenship has been constructed to hierarchically privilege and/or dispossess different classes of subjects.

In this conversation with Steve Scher, professor Lomawaima discusses the power that stereotypes hold in our societies, “the rights of self-determination and inherent sovereigns,” and what it means for native people to also hold U.S. citizenship.