Philadelphia Story: Abolitionists, Indian Removal, and the Price of Denial
Date: 10/20/2021
Time: 11:30 am EST
Location: Zoom
Join Chhange for our October Lunch and Learn featuring Paul Chaat Smith. Mr. Smith will discuss the intersection of two powerful social movements of the 1830s and the unlikely alliance between Cherokee slaveowners and leading abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. As the long-buried story of Native American enslavement of Africans has slowly come to light, this episode can help us understand why it was ignored for so long, and why it matters now.
History often ignores our preferred narratives and cruelly turns our heroes into villains. It’s not easy when this happens. Mr. Smith will explore ways to process and think about these bracing contradictions at the root of the American project.
Paul Chaat Smith serves as Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. He’s organized many exhibitions, including the critically acclaimed Americans, and is the author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, and with Robert Warrior, Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. He lives in Washington and watches way too much sports on television.
Brookdale Community College Global Citizenship Project