Klamath Henry is a senior majoring in Anthropology. She was awarded a Spring 2019 Conference Grant which she used to attend the 7th Annual Screening Media Festival at the University of Pennsylvania.
As a Native American woman, I always try to embed my research in topics of interest and relevance to my people. The larger institution of higher education has not been historically accessible for my people. Even to this day, there are very few Native peoples’ voices being heard in academia. It is important for non-Native people to hear our stories and learn from our ways of knowing. Alongside that, institutions of higher learning can also work to preserve and protect some of the older ways of Native knowing and teaching that may be lost within the next few generations of people.
Given that I am in a position of privilege, I decided a year ago to take it upon myself to produce an ethnography that would benefit my people. Paternally, I am affiliated with the Tuscarora Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. My father and I’s family have been the historical caregivers of the Tuscarora white corn and Three Sisters crop.
Through the visual arts of photography and video and the written art of poetry, my research captured, through my feminine/matriarchal Indigenous lens, the experience of the Tuscarora Nation’s food resiliency. This project specifically displays, through the practice of ethnography, how the Three Sisters food system has survived the genocide of the Indigenous peoples’ food systems in North America, and how my own personal life interacts with the resiliency of the crop. This project also uses public anthropology to display ethnographic work on the current status of Indigenous food systems within the Tuscarora tribe of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The interdisciplinary environmental food analysis was produced from the training I received in the ENVS department at Emory University. The fieldwork and historical research for this project was done under the supervision of Dr. Debra Vidali (Dept. of Anthropology) in the fall of 2017, ANT497R.
This piece of anthropological research specifically triggers viewers to take into consideration how their own personal relationships with food, land, and Thanksgiving may be problematic for the invisible voices of the Indigenous peoples of the United States. It challenges the traditional means by which ethnography is produced, and as a piece of research has significant value to the growing interest in Indigenous studies at Emory University. The website displaying this research can be found here.
URP and the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory Lester and Turner Grant for Conferences funded my trip to present this research at the Screening Scholarship Media Festival at the University of Pennsylvania. CAMRA SSMFwas a conference that was located primarily inside the Annenberg School for Communication, March 29th-31st, 2019. I presented in the afternoon in a Saturday session and sat on a panel amongst other undergraduate multimodal researchers.
It was an unusual experience for me to learn from so many established and interdisciplinary scholars all in the same weekend. It was overwhelming. My favorite part of the conference was the keynote discussion and audio performance. The keynote discussion had professors from different disciplines, which forced them to challenge each other while answering questions from the audience about multimodality and scholarship.
I am grateful for the support from Emory University, URP, and the Department of Environmental Sciences for my travel to the SSMF in Philadelphia, PA. The conference gave me a lot of insight as to what my next steps may be in my graduate research. It also allowed for me to share my people’s history to a larger audience. The networking from this conference was also useful.
Nya:weh!Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Conference Grants.
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