MSU4th Annual Indigenous Law Conference -- Call for Panels

Friends:

Michigan State University College of Law's Indigenous Law and Policy Center is planning its 4th Annual Indigenous Law Conference. The conference will be held here in lovely East Lansing on October 19-20, 2007, in the midst of the wonderful Michigan autumn.

Our conference topic is American Indian Law and Literature. We believe this will be the very first conference of its kind, for while there are many Indian Law conferences and many Indian Literature conferences, they have yet to be joined. Given the importance of storytelling and oral histories to winning the big treaty cases, the development of tribal customary law, and so on, this is surprising.

But American Indian Law and Literature as a field of serious study has always been here -- it just hasn't been identified as such yet. Witness Gordon Henry's series of stories beginning with "Requiem for a Leg" in his The Light People, perhaps the first and only fictional trial between Indians and anthros over the property rights to the frozen leg of a dead Anishinaabe elder.

Representative and recent samples of American Indian Law and Literature include without limitation:

• Kristen Carpenter's "Contextualizing the Losses of Allotment through Literature" available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962525
• Kirsten Matoy Carlson, "Unresolved Disputes: Narratives in the Transformation and Processing of Persistent Claims," abstract available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=916513
• David Carlson [no relation to Kirsten], Sovereign Selves, http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f05/carlson.html
• Amelia Katansky, Learning to Write "Indian": The Boarding School Experience and American Indian Literature, http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=978-0-8061-3852-7
• Matthew L.M. Fletcher, "Looking to the East: The Stories of Modern Indian People and the Development of Tribal Law," available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=900213

We have already lined up a stellar cast of speakers, including Richard Delgado (Pitt Law), our keynote. Others include Larry Cata Backer (Penn State Law), Jo Carrillo (Hastings Law), Kristen Carpenter (Denver Law), Kirsten Carlson (Mich. PhD), David Carlson (CSU-San Bernadino Literature), Gordon Henry (MSU Literature), Amelia Katanski (Kalamazoo College Literature), and Jean Stefancic (Pitt Law), not to mention us at the Center (Matthew Fletcher, Wenona Singel, and Kate Fort).

We have a skeletal list of panelists so far. If you're interested, please send us a short (I mean, short!) proposal for either a single talk or a panel. We'd be delighted to hear from a wide variety of scholars. Please email me at matthew.fletcher@law.msu.edu

We'd like to hear from you as soon as possible, but no later than June 30, 2007 (of course that deadline is especially arbitrary since I just made it up, but we do need some time to plan!).

Baamaa,

Matthew Fletcher, Wenona Singel, and Kate Fort