Shelby Johnson to deliver Drake Lecture – March 20
Friday, March 20
Time TBA
Divinity 127
“Dreaming Sacagawea”
Across the thousands of pages that comprise the 18modern volumes of William Clark and Meriweather Lewis’s journals on the Corps of Discovery (1803-1806), Sacagawea appears in just a hundred passages. Although she may be the most well-documented Indigenous woman of the early 19th century, few of these entries referred to her by name. By contrast, in many public parks, museum exhibits, and popular images she emerges with immense, but static, legibility. She appears as an archetype of what Patricia Vettel-Becker names “America’s maternal feminine,” for she is always portrayed walking thousands of miles while carrying her child—a posture largely invented by white suffragettes in the early 20th century. In its aspiration to do more than merely recount the sedimentations of sexual violence and settler expropriation deposited by the expedition’s records and popular mythology, this presentation forges another itinerary for writing about Sacagawea’s life, one that subsumes colonial regimes of verifiable “facts” with other ways of knowing. I imagine what it could look like to write over and tear through the empirical “truths” assembled in Lewis and Clark’s journals, as well as her overdetermined mythology in popular images, with the lived experiences of Sacagawea’s community, human and otherwise.
Shelby Johnson is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches on sexuality, race and, environmental studies in the long eighteenth century. She is the author of “The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World,” which analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World and examines how their literary production informs “modes of being” that confronted violent colonial times. She was co-editor of Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century (Delaware University Press, 2024), and her work has appeared in MELUS, English Language Notes, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. She is at work on Climates of Consent: Population Relocation, Cooperative Movements, and Slow Violence, 1783-1840, which investigates imperial configurations of consent and coercion that animated both large-scale population relocations of communities of color and the organization of white cooperative movements. She holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt.
The event is part of the Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series.