Professor Rosalyn LaPier
Associate Professor
Environmental Studies
University of Montana
Professor LaPier will discuss why there is no better time in history for Indigenous people to be telling and writing their own stories. Her grandmother and community elders encouraged her to document and write down their knowledge and history. They recognized that although they only recently began speaking and writing in the English language – it had power. With their encouragement, writing became a way, as poet laureate Joy Harjo stated, to “reinvent the enemy’s language,” and to give new life to long told histories.
