"Rez Theory: Revealing the Critical Significance of Everyday Native Life" with Dr. Mallory Whiteduck

Reservations are often thought of in terms of what they lack but this talk will ask scholars to direct their attention instead to “the rez.” The rez is a place that speaks through ephemera, humor, and aesthetics, and everyday Native folks are its makers. Rez theory makes the relatively radical claim that ordinary rez life is critical, tactical, and theoretically significant. For as long as reservations have existed as settler colonial projects, Native people have been undoing and undermining the construction of categories around them. This talk introduces the thematics that form rez theory and explores the rez aesthetics of Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine.

Mallory Whiteduck is Algonquin from Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg and an assistant professor of Indigenous Political Thought in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s Department of American Culture. Her research developing the concept of rez theory won the 2022 American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize.