Speaker
Daniel Grant
Postdoctoral Fellow
Harvard University
Daniel Grant is an environmental historian of the North American West and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in migration and the humanities at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Description
In this webinar, Daniel will present research from his current book project, which tells three fine-grained, interwoven stories of Cocopa Indians, Quechan Indians, and African Americans who resisted displacement at the hands of the U.S. and Mexican governments by inhabiting brushy tracts of bottomlands along the Colorado River on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Through archival and oral history research in the U.S. and Mexico, the project focuses on disparate histories of global migration—the African diaspora and Indigenous border-crossing—that converged in this localized borderland. Because neither nation-state could settle the fugitive landscape of the river’s bottomlands, the river offered these groups creative, if adaptive, strategies to maintain residence amidst increasing settler encroachment and border constraints. Fundamentally, these stories reveal what he calls social undercurrents—subtle exceptions of place-based resistance and survival roiling beneath the surface of prevailing trends of settler colonialism. Daniel will give an overview of the project and delve into a more fine-grained example. He will also discuss how these histories can inform public dialogue over shared but troubled multiracial pasts through an event he facilitated with descendants of these groups.
Learning Objectives
- Recognize how multiracial histories of human migration have converged in the Colorado River borderlands
- Analyze how the legacies of these histories manifest in contemporary conflicts over environmental justice
- Evaluate how rivers have historically been sources of both power and displacement for Native and African American communities
Webinar Recording & PDH Certificate
Included with your webinar registration is access to a recording of the program and a fillable certificate to self-report your Professional Development Hour (PDH)/Continuing Education Credit (CEU). Your certificate will be available to download and a link to the recording of this webinar will be sent within a week of the live program from [email protected]. The recording is exclusively for you, the registrant of the webinar. They are not to be shared or forwarded.