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Sustainers of Culture and Life: Mohican Women’s Artistry and Food Cultivation in the Homelands
March 16, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Wednesday, March 16 @ 6 PM
As Mohican people were forced from their homelands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women’s roles as cultivators of the soil and keepers of cultural traditions were threatened. English missionaries sought to eradicate indigenous methods of food cultivation and reorient Mohican women’s roles to English-style housekeeping. While male-plow agriculture was ultimately adopted by the Stockbridge Mohican community, women continued to act as important cultivators of the earth, tending their own Indigenous gardens and gathering wild fruit and herbs for sustenance and healing. This relationship with the earth and the preservation of Mohican knowledge and culture also carried over into Mohican women’s artistry through their beadwork and basketry. Join us as we explore just a few of the many ways Mohican women sustained their communities and relationship to the land during their era of forced removals.
Kallie Kosc (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. Her first book project, “The Education of Mary Peters: Mohican Women, Race, and Citizenship in Early America,” investigates the ways Mohican women navigated the expanding settler state during their era of removals (c. 1780-1850). Her research and teaching interests center on Indigenous experiences in North America, gender and sexuality, and the environment. She has been a learner and researcher of Stockbridge-Munsee community history since 2011 and gives thanks to the many tribal members who continue to inform her research and teaching.