VRA 2022: Keynote Speaker Ashley Minner

One of the conference highlights each year is our keynote speaker. This year is no exception! We are excited to be joined in Baltimore by Ashley Minner, whose talk is titled "Repatriating the Archives: An Urban Reservation Reunion." You can read more about her topic below. The Convocation Keynote is scheduled for March 30, 2022, at 4:30 pm EDT.Dr. Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland, and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She earned an MFA (’11) and MA (’07) in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a PhD (’20) in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. In addition to maintaining her artistic practice, Ashley works as Assistant Curator for History and Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.For those who cannot be with us in person in Baltimore, Dr. Minner's talk will be live streamed over Zoom. As always, the VRA Keynote is open to everyone. You can register to attend the talk via Zoom by clicking this link. Please share widely! 

Repatriating the Archives: An Urban Reservation ReunionThe place now known as Baltimore, like the rest of what is now known as the United States of America, has always been home to Native peoples. Baltimore is part of the ancestral homelands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock, and a diverse host of American Indian folks from many nations have passed through or lived here at different times, and still do. In the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Lumbee Indians and members of other tribal nations migrated to Baltimore City, seeking jobs and a better quality of life. On the east side of town, they created a vibrant, intertribal American Indian community, which they affectionately referred to as their "reservation." In the decades since, due to a complex set of factors ranging from upward mobility, to Urban Renewal, to gentrification, most American Indian people moved away from the area, which continues to transform. In collaboration with her elders, Ashley Minner has been mining archives to repatriate their heritage and reconstruct East Baltimore's "reservation." She sees this as an urgent project of reclamation of history, space, and belonging.