In recent years, organizers, scholars, public history practitioners, and digital publics have emphasized the intertwined nature of Black and Indigenous histories, presents, and futures. Join us for this opening conversation between Dr. Kyle T. Mays and Dr. Mary Amanda McNeil about Black and Indigenous relational geographies in the city.
Speaker Bio:
Kyle T. Mays (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar of US history, urban studies, race relations, and contemporary popular culture. He is an Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mays’ work broadly explores three questions: What is the relationship between blackness and indigeneity? How does dispossession in cities shape the lives of Black and Indigenous peoples? And finally, how can we imagine and put into praxis a world in the aftermath of settler colonialism and white supremacy? Mays is the author of numerous articles and three books: Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018); An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021), and City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
About The Rez & The Hood series:
This season, we are collaborating with Mary Amanda McNeil (she/her), Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, to bring you “The Rez and The Hood,” a DS4SI Design Gym speaker series, that celebrates local practices of Black and Indigenous placekeeping, stewardship, and institution-building. Across four events, panelists from the Commonwealth will reflect upon their lives’ work while attending to broader thematic questions such as: What has happened to us spatially? How have we created life-affirming geographies in the midst of settler colonial and anti-Black dispossession and displacement? What are our visions for the future?
The places we call home have been spatially transformed by settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and other forms of domination; this shapes the conditions of life and death for Black and Indigenous families, communities, and nations in the lands that are commonly referred to as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And yet, BIPOC political organizers, community members, and tribal citizens have fought against colonial, national, and local policies of dispossession and displacement for the past four centuries—insisting upon their responsibility to remain in place and critically shaping their environments in the process.
Register to join us and be a part of this rich dialogue.
About the Moderator:
Mary Amanda McNeil (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Her research, teaching, and public history work sit at the intersections of Black studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; social history; and geography, with especial attention to the Northeast. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, McNeil is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and lives in Dorchester.