Profs & Pints Baltimore: Baltimore's American Indian Reservation
Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Baltimore’s American Indian ‘Reservation,’” on the city’s fascinating history as a destination for American Indian migrants, with Ashley Minner Jones, former professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and enrolled citizen of the Lumbee Tribe.
In the mid-twentieth century thousands of members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, as well as people from other tribal nations, migrated to Baltimore City in search of jobs and a better quality of life. They formed a vibrant, urban, intertribal American Indian community that they affectionately referred to as their “reservation.”
Today’s Baltimoreans often are surprised to learn such a community ever existed, but its history is now coming to light thanks to an intergenerational team’s efforts to map it. The results, so far, have been three free public resources: an illustrated guide to the reservation, a website devoted to it, and a mobile walking tour app. A related Library of Congress project is underway.
Learn about this undertaking and what it has meant with Ashley Minner Jones, a community-based visual artist, curator, folklorist and former assistant curator of history and culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Drawing from research being archived as the Ashley Minner Collection in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Dr. Minner Jones will discuss the Lumbee Tribe and what brought so many of its members to East Baltimore. She’ll also talk about why so few people have heard about “the Reservation” and what lessons its history offers for us today.
Dr. Minner Jones’ interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place—usually within the context of the U.S. South—and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. You’ll emerge from her talk with a much richer understanding of people who have called Baltimore home. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
