Heyman Center. Second Floor Common Room
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Literature, Culture, and Environment Colloquium, Global South and Postcolonial Colloquium, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Tlingit art and story constitute a superb, ancient, and ever-evolving tradition. In the last century, however, many attempts to describe the fundamental features of this tradition have used vocabulary borrowed from the English language. This talk presents some of the complex thinking that Tlingit tradition bearers past and present have worked out in their own language to discuss representation, symbolism, and the relationship between human and non-human acts of creation. The result is an aesthetics inseparable from cosmology, based on a deeply considered idea of what it means to exist in a world where everything is alive.
Matthew Spellberg is the founding Dean and Chair of Literature at Outer Coast, a new institution of higher education in Sitka, Alaska. He is an Editor-at-Large at Cabinet Magazine, Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages grant, and a board member of the Sharing Our Knowledge Conference in Southeast Alaska. He is the creator of the Dream Parliament, a project on the history and practice of collective dream-sharing featuring collaborators from across the United States and Canada. A learner of Tlingit, he frequently teaches for Outer Coast’s free and open online Alaska Native Language courses. He is co-editor, with Ishmael Hope, of a book of Tlingit texts forthcoming from Harvard/Dumbarton Oaks.
