“More than a Garden: What the Garden Writings of D’Arcy McNickle Tell Us About Indigenous Encounters with Settler Colonialism” – Dr. Dan Cobb, Professor of American Studies, UNC Chapel Hill

This event is a part of a series celebrating American Indian Heritage Month. For the full calendar of events, scroll below, or download here: AIHM 2021 Calendar FINAL

Nov. 4, 12:00pm-1:00pm: Virtual Lunchbox Talk: “More than a Garden: What the Garden Writings of D’Arcy McNickle Tell Us About Indigenous Encounters with Settler Colonialism”

Speaker: Dr. Daniel Cobb, Professor of American Studies, UNC Chapel Hill

Zoom webinar, Free, $5 suggested donation

Pre-registration required

Hosted by: NC Botanical Garden

 Event page, information, registration: https://reg.abcsignup.com/reg/event_page.aspx?ek=0005-0014-2ae1071ea1cc4683a8c02579eed20c09

Description: D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) is one of the twentieth century’s most important American Indian writers, intellectuals, and political actors. In addition to authoring several classic works of fiction and history, he played a vital role in reforming federal Indian policy and cultivating a generation of young activists from the 1930s to the early 1970s. While much has been written about his novels, the diary he kept during these years has been almost completely overlooked. At first glance, it doesn’t tell the stories scholars expect to hear about his life—a life typically cast as “a search for identity between Indian and white worlds.” This talk takes a closer look at his garden writing—one of the things that has caused the diary to be dismissed—and finds in it a crucial window into not only his experiential world but also one Indigenous person’s means of grappling with settler colonialism. In these ways, we will see that McNickle’s garden writing is about “more than a garden.”

Daniel M. Cobb is a Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An award-winning writer and teacher, he is the author of numerous books, edited volumes, articles, and the Great Courses devoted to Native Peoples of North America. He served as the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki in 2017-2018 and as a Visiting Research at the University of Tübingen in Germany in 2019. This particular project has its roots in his tenure as Assistant Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at The Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois.