Native Biography as Process and Product: Perspectives on History, Storytelling, and Knowledge Production
Date and Time
Location
NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS
SPEAKER: Rachel Wheeler, Indiana University Indianapolis; Sarah Eyerly, Florida State University
Historian Rachel Wheeler and musicologist Sarah Eyerly will speak about their efforts to extend the method of relational historiography they employed in their Singing Box 331 project to a co-authored biography of Mohican leader, Joshua (1742–1806), that centers the relationships that anchored him to family, community, and land in the past and present. Inspired by Native American and Indigenous Studies methods that highlight Native survivance, creativity, and participation in the shaping of America, the book’s narrative is fueled by longstanding and new relationships and collaborations with descendant communities and cultural sites. Joshua’s life as a Mohican man, married to a Munsee woman, baptized into a German church, who lived much of his life on Native lands encompassed within British colonial borders demonstrates the futility of splintering American history into so many separate stories. Joshua’s story unsettles the usual categories of racial, religious, and political identity that frame narratives of America’s national history and stakes a claim that Native history is American history and thus speaks powerfully to contemporary debates over the meaning of America’s past and the possibilities of America’s future as we approach the 250th anniversary of 1776.
About the Speakers
Rachel Wheeler (Religious Studies, Indiana University Indianapolis) and Sarah Eyerly (Musicology, Florida State University) began a collaborative research partnership in 2011. They have co-authored multiple publications, including the article and digital project, “Singing Box 331: Re-Sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives” (The William and Mary Quarterly, 2019).
Eyerly’s research and teaching interests include sound studies, music and religion, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and the geo-humanities. Her first book, Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early America (Indiana University Press, 2020), received the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society and the Dale W. Brown Book Award from the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
Wheeler’s research and teaching interests include Midwestern religious history, digital storytelling, and public humanities scholarship. Her book To Live upon Hope (Cornell, 2008) focuses on the history of Mohican encounters with German Moravian and English Congregational missionaries in the eighteenth-century.