Expert on American Indian and Native Hawaiian issues to speak

An expert in American Indian and Native Hawaiian history and culture speaks at Bates College at 4:15 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Room G21, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

Professor of history, American studies and American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, David Chang presents the talk Borderlands in a World at Sea: Konkow Indians, Native Hawaiians and South Chinese in Global and National Spaces, 1860s-1880s.

The annual Tangney Lecture is sponsored by the Charles and Virginia Tangney Fund and the history department at Bates, and is open to the public free of charge. For more information, please call Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall at 207-786-6462.

A historian of intersectional race and ethnicity in the United States, Chang studies the histories of American Indian and Native Hawaiian people. His book The Color of the Land (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), argues for the central place of struggles over land ownership in the history of racial and national construction by Creeks, African Americans and whites in the Creek Nation and eastern Oklahoma.

He is currently working on a long-range research project that draws on the archive of Hawaiian-language sources in order to reveal Native Hawaiians’ perspectives on the nature of the 19th-century world and their place in it.