Please join the University at Buffalo Gender Institute and Center for Diversity Innovation for an exciting lecture from the 2020-2021 Distinguished Visiting Scholar Mishuana Goeman. The lecture, entitled “Electric Lights, Tourist Sights: Gendering Dispossession and Settler Colonial Infrastructure at Niagara Falls,” will take place via Zoom on October 15, 2020 at 4 p.m. (EDT). Please register for your free ticket in order to receive the link in advance of the program: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mishuana-goeman-lecture-electric-lights-tourist-sights-tickets-121606619673

For more information, please see the attached flyer and Dr. Goeman’s abstract below:

Niagara Falls has become an important monument marking the boundary of the United States northern border and Canada’s Southern border.

For Seneca people however, the falls are the place where the Thunder Beings reside and thus it is a place instrumental to Seneca experience of place.

Built up as a tourist site in the early 1900’s and later marketed as a honeymoon site, Niagara Falls becomes an important geographical area to extend my work in examining state produced space (such as making of monuments and jurisdictions) and Indigenous place-making (such as the reflection of experiences through intergenerational stories regarding specific sites, that in turn produce a value system).

Niagara Falls becomes a site of biopolitical power in which Americans and Canadian settlers come to know themselves by not only sacrificing the Indian maiden, but literally sacrificing Haudenosuanee histories,
land, water and meanings of place.

This source of electricity built the grid upon which Buffalo as an industrial city flourished. As the middle class accumulates wealth, Niagara Falls is advertised widely as a vacation spot in New York City circles. I am interested not just in individual Indigenous cities but looking at the interconnecting links between them that create a grid of Indigenous dispossession.