2002 Sequoyah Research Center Symposium - Celebrating Indigenous Lives

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is an Anishnaabe writer of mixed ancestry from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation.  She lives and works at Neyaashiinigmiing, Cape Croker Reserve on the Saugeen Penisula in Southwestern Ontario.  Her writing has been published in various anthologies, journals, and magazines in Canada, The U. S., Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Germany.  She is the founder and managing editor of Kegedonce Press.

Jack D. Baker of Oklahoma City, a graduate of Oklahoma State University, is retired from Liberty Mutual Insurance Company.  An enrolled Cherokee, he is president of the National Trail of Tears Association, a member of the National Park Service Trail of Tears Historic Trail Advisory Board, treasurer of the Cherokee National Historical Society, president of the Goingsnake District Heritage Association, and member of the Cherokee Nation Constitutional Convention, and is an active participant in a number of other historical and civic projects.

John Berry, Choctaw, holds an MLS degree from the University of Missouri, Columbia, is now Native American Studies Librarian, University of California, Berkeley.  He has worked as Native American Studies Librarian at Oklahoma State University and has served as president of the American Indian Library Association.  He has a number of poems published both in print and on the web.

S. G. Briscoe, Choctaw, is a graduate student in Milwaukee.  Her field of study is education technology.

Linda Burridge is a librarian who has spent much of the past six years developing a comprehensive collection of imaginative literature written by Aboriginal authors.  She is the Research Director for the Canadian Journal of Native Studies and the Associate Editor of Bibliography of Native American Writers, 1772-Present.

David Anthony Tyeeme Clark, Mesquakie, is a Ford Foundation Minority Fellow in the American Studies Program at the University of Kansas and, beginning August 2002, assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas.  His recent and forthcoming publications include, with Joane Nagel, “ White Men, Red Masks:  Appropriations of ‘Indian’ Manhood in Imagined Wests,” in Across the Great Divide:  Cultures of Manhood in the American West (Routledge, 2001); “Breaking Iron Bonds, Elucidating Fluid Boundaries:  ‘Indians’ in American Studies,” American Quarterly 53 (Spring 2001); and, with Troy Johnson and Joane Nagel, Roots of Red  Power; American Protest and Resistance, from Wounded Knee to the Chicago Indian Conference (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).  Contributor to forthcoming Indigenizing the Academy:  Native Academics Sharpening the Edge, ed. Devon Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson (University of Nebraska Press, 2003)

Evelyn Conley (Cherokee) is the Community Coordinator in the Office of the Deputy Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Sterling Fluharty is a graduate student in history at the University of Oklahoma.  He is currently assisting the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) with historic preservation of documents and oral history.  His dissertation will be on NIYC history through 1974.

John Luke Flyinghorse, Sr., Hunkpapa Lakota, is a combat veteran, cowboy, long-haul truck driver, artist, musician, councilman, tipimaker, poet, and storyteller. He lives with his wife and children on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.  He began writing in 1995 and has published two books on Lakota history and culture and has a novel in progress.  He writes under the name of his maternal grandfather, Eya Mani, which is Speaks Walking in the Lakota language, in honor of his grandfather.

Marvin Francis, Cree/Chipewyan, is from Heart Lake in the north of Alberta.  A member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective, Francis is a poet/playwright for radio/performances and a visual artist.  Marvin is presently in the Ph.D. program, in English, at the University of Manitoba.

Scott German, born and reared on the Lake Traverse Reservation of South Dakota, served in the U. S. Army from the army in 1987 to 1990.  In 1992, he became  the youngest individual elected to the tribal council since the adoption of an Indian Reorganization Act model constitution in 1946 and has served on numerous boards and committees within the tribal structure since leaving the council in 1995.  He was appointed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to the South Dakota State Advisory Committee on Civil Rights.  He will speak about Indians in the military.

Ted Isham, Muscogee (Creek), has been working in the Creek community for over twelve years as a Muscogee language student and preservationist.  He is one of the founders of the Mvskoke Language Institute.  He has studied linguistics at the University of Oklahoma, teaches Creek as adjunct faculty at Oklahoma State University, and is the Curator of the Creek Council House Museum at Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Ralph Keen, Jr., an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, is an attorney at Stilwell, Oklahoma, and has served as vice-chairman of the Cherokee Constitutional Commission during revision of the Nation’s constitution.

Christopher LaLonde, scholar and critic, has published essays on Native American literature and was editor of the 1998 special issue of SAIL on the works of Louis Owens.  His book-length studies are William Faulkner and the Rites of Passage (1996) and Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns:  The Novels of Louis Owens (2002).  He has taught at North Carolina Wesleyan College and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Finland.  He will participate in a session devoted to Anishinaabe literature.

Patricia A. Loew, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Life Science Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a producer for WHA-TV (PBS) and co-host of WeekEnd, a weekly news and public affairs program that airs statewide on Wisconsin Public Television. She is author of dozens of scholarly and general interest articles on Native topics and has produced several award-winning documentaries, including No Word for Goodbye, Spring of Discontent, Throwaway Future, and Nation Within a Nation, which have appeared on commercial and public television stations throughout the country.  Loew is an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and author of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal.

Catherine Anne Martin was born in Florida 1958, the daughter of Mi'kmaq parents from the Millbrook First Nation in Truto, Nova Scotia.  She graduated from Dalhousie University in 1979 with a BA in Theatre and earned an MA in Education from Mount St. Vincent University in 1998.  In 1990, Martin became Nova Scotia's first Mi'kmaq filmmaker with the release of the 6-minute
documentary Minqon Minqon.  Since then she has made a number of films.  In addition to her award-winning filmmaking, Martin has been director of the Atlantic Indian Arts and Crafts Corporation, and coordinator of the Mi'kmaq Professional Careers Project at Dalhousie University, and for a while taught
Native Studies and co-directed the Transition Year Program at Dalhousie.  She chaired the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry, was one of the original steering committee members of the Aboriginal Film and Video Alliance, the Nova Scotia arts Council, and the Museums and First Peoples Task Force, and served on the Executive Board of Directors for the Aboriginal Peoples
Television Network.  She is currently a counselor at the Native Education Counseling Centre at Dalhousie University.

Glen McGuire, Pawnee, was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma, and as a youth hitchhiked, rode freight trains, and did odd jobs through most of the western states.  He graduated from Haskell Institute in 1939 and was a high school teacher in Midwestern farming communities, St. Louis ghettos, and Indian schools in Kansas and California.  He did Army combat duty in the South Pacific during World War II.  McGuire retired from teaching at Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California, and following retirement began writing.  His collection of poetry, Spider Spins Between Two Worlds, is now in its third edition.   He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he writes and pursues his pastime of running marathons.

Julie Moss is a poet, former editor and publisher of The Indigenous Eye, and community activist.  She has served as a member of the Amnesty International USA Indigenous Task Force and as Tribal Council secretary for the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.

Rhonda Harris Taylor, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma.  She currently serves as editor of The American Indian Libraries Newsletter, the newsletter of the American Indian Library Association.  Her most recent publication is "Focusing on Native Americans:  basic Web resources pathfinder," in Collection Building (vol. 21, no. 2, 2002).

Ted Underwood, Seminole, is a founder of, and has served for a number of years as consultant to, the historic preservation office of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and in that capacity has been involved in repatriation and other issues.  For the past sixteen years, he has served as Band Chief for the Mekusukey Band.

Linda Sue Warner, Comanche, is CEO of the Indian Community School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  She earned an M. Ed. Degree from The Pennsylvania State University and a Ph. D. from the University of Oklahoma and holds a research appointment with the University of Missouri-Columbia, Truman Center for Public Policy.  She has over 30 years of experience in Indian education.  She began her career in the public schools of Missouri before entering the BIA service as a teacher in Alaska in 1974 and worked for the next eighteen years in Alaska, New Mexico, Kansas, and Arizona.  After leaving federal service, she taught at the University of Kansas and The Pennsylvania State University and, in 1996, assumed her present position at the University of Missouri.

William Welge is head of the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society, one of the nation’s most prestigious repositories of American Indian historical research collections.  He holds a Master’s Degree in History from Central Oklahoma State University and has more than twenty years of experience in the archiving and management of records relating to American Indians.  In 1989 he became the first Certified Archivist in Oklahoma and was recertified in 1997.  In addition to his duties at the Oklahoma Historical Society, he served on the Alfred P. Murrah Bombing Memorial Committee during its tenure, 1995-2000.

Greg Young-Ing  is a member of Opasquiak Cree Nation in The Pas, Manitoba and has a Master of Arts degree from the Institute of Canadian Studies, Carleton University, and a Master of Publishing degree from Simon Fraser University.  He has worked for the Assembly of First Nations, the former Native Council of Canada, and the Native Women’s Association of Canada.  His literary works have been published in Canada, the U. S. and Australia, and he is the editor of Gatherings journal and a former instructor at the En’owkin International School of Writing.  He is the Managing Editor of Theytus Books, the first Aboriginal publishing house in Canada.