“Beautiful, Resistant, and Resilient”

A conversation with Kirby Brown, Associate Professor of English
By Jason Stone, University Communications

An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Kirby Brown is the author of Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907–1970, a recipient of the 2019–2021 Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellowship in the Liberal Arts, and director of the UO Native American Studies program.

How would you describe your sense of Indigenous identity?

To be an Indigenous person is to be from a place, from a People, and from a history and culture that is tied to family and the extensive relations that define our contemporary communities and tribal nations. There’s an incredible diversity to contemporary Native identity that is complicated and even messy in some respects, but always beautiful, resistant, and resilient.

One of your research interests is “Native American Modernisms”—what do you mean by this term?

To the extent that “modern” represents “the new” or “innovation” or “adaptation,” Indigenous People have always been “modern.” Prior to contact, we created and exchanged technologies and knowledge with one another and built relations across communities. So in one sense, thinking about Native American Modernism or Indigenous modernities complicates our perception of “the modern” and its relationship to “Indianness” on a conceptual level.

In literary studies, modernism is understood in a more particular way to mean an intentional break from the past and the embrace of the new via radical formal innovation in aesthetic production. It’s conventionally been situated around the 1910s–1940s, and in the United States discussions around modernism have tended to focus on a small cohort of mostly white writers from metropolitan centers.

In recent years, however, the field has begun to look at multiple modernisms taking place outside of European and American national and imperial centers. That’s really expanded our perspectives of what, when, and where “modernity” is, and the multiple ways it gets translated into aesthetic forms. We’re now examining the works of Native and Indigenous writers and writers from other historically marginalized communities as active producers and critics of modernity who have been previously excluded from those discussions.

Can you speak to some of the specific challenges that the COVID era has created for Native communities on our campus?

It’s a real challenge to build community when you’re not in community. Our cultural spaces are essential to this effort, and our colleagues in places like the Many Nations Longhouse , the Native American Student Union, the Native American and Indigenous Studies ARC, and the Sapsik'ʷałá Program are going to some extraordinary efforts in very difficult circumstances to continue their service to community.

What does inclusion mean to you—and how do we achieve more of it at the UO?

First, we acknowledge that we’re on Kalapuya ilihi, the traditional homeland of the Kalapuya people, whose descendants are citizens of two federally recognized sovereign tribal nations: The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. We acknowledge that the very existence of the University of Oregon is predicated fundamentally on their forced removal, and that there is a direct correlation between those acts of violence and dispossession and the current underrepresentation of Native American students, faculty, and staff on this campus.

What inclusion means to me is that you recognize and own that history, accept the contemporary responsibilities and obligations it demands, and do whatever it takes to structurally address those issues.