Virtual Lunchbox Talk: More Than A Garden: What the Garden Writings of D’Arcy McNickle Tell Us About Indigenous Encounters with Settler Colonialism

with Daniel M. Cobb, Professor of American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The registration period has closed for this event.

Date: Thursday, November 4, 2021

Time: 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST

Location: Zoom webinar

Fee: Free, $5 suggested fee

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.”