Amherst Reads Interview

A conversation between Fred Hoxie '69 and Kiara Vigil, assistant professor of American Studies at Amherst.

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I don’t think of this as a simple story and I don’t think it has a simple conclusion...For a long time I have been interested in the connection between traditional major subjects in American history and Native American subjects.

 

 

 

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Kiara Vigil is an assistant professor of American Studies at Amherst. Her research interests center on a history of representations of and by Native peoples from the Americas,  in particular concern the turn of the twentieth century moment. Vigil’s current book project, "Stories in Red and Write: Indian Intellectuals and the American Imagination, 1880-1930," examines the cultural production of four prominent Indian intellectuals: Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Gertrude Bonnin, and Luther Standing Bear within the shifting social and political milieu of the early twentieth century. Using collective cultural biography as my analytical framework,  she argues that these figures were integral to the shaping of debates concerning citizenship and race within American society during the early twentieth century.