Julie L. Reed presents Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History
Schedule
Thu, 19 Mar, 2026 at 06:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779 | Sylva, NC
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Julie L. Reed will visit City Lights on Thursday, March 19th at 6:00pm to share her new book, LAND, LANGUAGE, and WOMEN: A Cherokee and American Educational History. A sweeping Indigenous history of education across generations
Historians largely understand Native American education through the Indian boarding schools and reservation schools established by the US government during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But Native Americans taught and learned from one another long before colonization, and while white settlers and institutions powerfully influenced Indigenous educational practices, they never stopped Native peoples from educating one another on their own terms.
In this ambitious and imaginatively conceived book, Julie L. Reed uses Cherokee teaching and learning practices spanning more than four centuries to reframe the way we think about Native American educational history. Reed draws on archaeological evidence from Southeastern US caves, ethnohistorical narratives of Cherokee syllabary development, records from Christian mission schools, Cherokee Nation archives, and family and personal histories to reveal surprising continuity amid powerful change. Centering the role of women as educators across generations in Cherokee matrilineal society, the power of land to anchor learning, and the significance of language in expressing sovereignty, Reed fundamentally rethinks the nature of educational space, the roles played by teachers and learners, and the periodization imposed by US settler colonialism onto the Indigenous experience.
Julie L. Reed is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She recently joined the history and anthropology departments at The University of Tulsa. Reed’s second book, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History (UNC Press January 2026), examines 400 years of Cherokee educational history using archaeology, ethnography, mission records, the Cherokee Nation’s archives and family history. Her first book, Serving the Nation (University of Oklahoma, 2016), traced the development and implementation of Cherokee social welfare institutions. She is currently at work on her third book, co-authored with historian Rose Stremlau, Sovereign Kin: A History of the Cherokee Nation.
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Where is it happening?
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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