Dickinson to Host Talk on Settler Governance and ‘Reconciliation’
Audra Simpson
The Morgan Lecture
by Layla Ilarraza '26
Audra Simpson, author and professor of anthropology at Columbia University, will deliver Dickinson’s Morgan Lecture, “Savage States: Settler Governance in an Age of Sorrow.” The lecture will take place Thursday, Feb. 29 at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. A book sale and signing will follow the program. The lecture will also be livestreamed.
Simpson will discuss tensions around Native peoples and their territorial claims in relation to settler governance. Her talk will review the history of residential boarding schools to current issues in the United States and Canada, and how settler governments have shifted from overt acts of violence to gentler, systemic governance. She will also discuss the concept of “reconciliation” in the context of its history and Indigenous criticism.
Simpson is a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk and a researcher and writer of Indigenous and settler society, politics and history. She authored the award-winning book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Border of Settler States, and is the co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies. Her work has appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Postcolonial Studies, Theory & Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review.
The Morgan Lectureship was endowed by Dickinson’s Board of Trustees in 1992, in grateful appreciation for the distinguished service of James Henry Morgan of the Class of 1878, dean, professor of Greek and president of the college. The lectureship brings to campus a scholar in residence to meet informally with individuals and class groups and to deliver the Morgan Lecture on topics in the social sciences and humanities. Recent scholars have included Winona LaDuke, Lila Abu-Lughod, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Allissa Richardson and Roosevelt Montás.
This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, the Morgan Lecture Fund, and co-sponsored by the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples.
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Published February 21, 2024