Hayley Negrin: Fugitive Lands: Indigenous Slavery and Gender in the Early American South

"Fugitive Lands: Indigenous Slavery and Gender in the Early American South”  

Thousands of Indigenous women and children were enslaved in South Carolina and Virginia in the colonial period of American history. Trafficked from their homelands across the Indigenous Southeast, they labored on tobacco and rice crops that were commodified for consumers across the Atlantic World. This lecture considers how to tell this Indigenous history of slavery and dispossession in concert with the better-known story of African slavery. Using the work of both Indigenous and Black feminists, I will consider the ethical implications and the potential for the “recovery” of the stories of enslaved Indigenous women and children from within a violent colonial archive. I will also consider what using the land as an archive can reveal about how enslaved Indigenous people created new relationships to plantation environments and fugitive spaces of survival."

Hayley Negrin received her Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2018, and joined the faculty at UIC after completing a year-long dissertation fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2017-2018). She specializes in Native American history, slavery, and the history of women and gender in the Atlantic World. Her current book project investigates the transformation of Indigenous kinship ties and politics under English chattel slavery in early North America. Once an active organizer in the NoDAPL movement in NYC, she is also interested in how contemporary Native nations are reframing conversations around sovereignty, the environment, citizenship, and gender equality to defend their rights and territories on the national and international stage.