2023-24 Provost Lecture Series
Treaties, Teaching, and First-Gen Land Grant Responsibilities
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
3:30 - 5:00p.m.
204/205 Multicultural Center
Lisa Tatonetti
Professor of English
2023-2024 Coffman Chair for University Distinguished Teaching Scholars
Biographical Sketch
Lisa Tatonetti is a settler scholar and Donnelly Professor in the Department of English, which she joined in 2005. She helped co-found K-State’s Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance, was part of the revival of the Kansas Association of Native American Education, and is a member of a state-level committee on Indigenous education. She co-created Kansas State’s Indigenous Peoples Day symposium and regularly makes good trouble with her Indigenous partners at K-State and beyond.
Tatonetti co-edited the award-winning Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature and is the author of two books: The Queerness of Native American Literature, a Thomas J. Lyons Book Award winner; and Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-cis Masculinities, recognized by the 2022 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Monograph from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Tatonetti loves teaching and has won multiple awards, including Kansas State University’s Ron Gaches Lifetime Teaching Award. Originally from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and a graduate of Florida State University for her BA and the Ohio State University for her PhD, Tatonetti lives in the Little Apple with her covid foster fails, Portia and Puck.
Abstract
As a Coffman Chair, I have collaborated with campus, state, and tribal partners to develop Indigenous-focused teaching and learning resources that foster knowledge about Kansas State’s land grant histories. Particularly, this work highlights the fact that the often-celebrated “grants” from the 1862 Morrill Act rest on the seizure and transfer of Indigenous land. At the center of this project, then, is how we can meet our first-gen land grant responsibilities by teaching this story—how land once held in common by the Kaáⁿze níkashiⁿga (Kanza people), today known as the Kaw Nation, became the location and economic foundation of Kansas State. This presentation will share teaching and learning resources created in relation to the Kansas Land Treaty Project, including two videos, oral histories, and curriculum that highlights the intersections of Indigenous histories and the Kansas State land grant. Together, we’ll discuss how and why we can infuse place-based understandings into our principals and methods of teaching and concretely extend these understandings for use across the state.
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