Treaty Art: Place, Belonging and Expressive Citizenship through Art Practices

MISHUANA GOEMAN, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a Professor of Indigenous Studies at University of Buffalo. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as Co-Principal Investigator (PI) on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resilience from Indigenous LA communities. She is the PI of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times.

She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the Inaugural Special Advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. She is the current President of the American Studies Association.

Treaty Art: Place, Belonging and Expressive Citizenship through Art Practices

Humanities Speaker Series: Mishuana Goeman, University of Buffalo

Monday, March 3, 2025

Helmerich Browsing Room, OSU Library

4:00pm-5:00pm, reception following

This talk explores the iconography of treaties in contemporary art practices in the context of one hundred years of the Indian Citizenship Act to Land Back. The Act itself centers on the human and the closing of the co-constitutive power of the US and Canadian territorial sovereignty. The act domesticates Indians as citizens under the shroud of American Legal territorial sovereignty, moving Indigenous lands to the purview of the secretary of the Interior in the US and under the patriarchy of the Indian Act in Canada. In contrast to this moment, artists have long depicted an alternative vision of the relationship between belonging and land that exceeds settler borders and their colonial premises.

Goeman looks at examples of the reconfiguration of forms of territorial sovereignty through art practices that rethink land and relationships not only between landed points but also in relation to other humans and more-than-humans. How do contemporary art practices create not only a sense of belonging but also a sense of reciprocity and responsibility? How is a “sea to shining sea” affective regime of belonging disrupted by the visual impact of Indigenous artists who address colonization and forms of settler structures of belonging that are often gendered practices? What might we gain from examining public art and other built environments where the subtlety of assertion of treaty rights, existing before the 1924 act, is not so apparent to an American public but is the iconography that creates a sense of belonging from those in reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Nations? How does expressive citizenship creatively refuse a hundred years of settler citizenship and disrupt colonial geographies based on patriarchal property logics?

Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies