Panel: 

Jill Doerfler -- "How Can I Help? Community Based Activism and Research" 

Dustin Tahmahkera-- "Visualizing Indigeneity: From Tribal Televisions to Cinematic Comanches" 

Kevin Whalen -- "Rethinking the Reservation Era: Labor, Migration, and BIA Bureaucracies"

Light refreshments will be served, and the event is preceded by a reception on Thursday, February 16 (4:30pm-5:45pm at Levis Faculty Center, 3rd Floor) that will introduce the program. Join us and celebrate former and current AIS postdoc fellows at UIUC.

Dr. Jill Doerfler (White Earth Anishinaabe) is an associate professor and the department head of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Her primary area of scholarly interest is American Indian, specifically Anishinaabe, identity with a political focus on citizenship. She has been involved in constitutional reform efforts with the White Earth Nation since 2007. Her most recent book, Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship Among the White Earth Anishinaabeg (2015), examines staunch Anishinaabe resistance to racialization and the complex issues surrounding tribal citizenship and identity.

Dr. Dustin Tahmahkera, an enrolled citizen of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, is an interdisciplinary scholar of North American indigeneities, critical media, and cultural sound studies. In his first book Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), Tahmahkera foregrounds representations of the indigenous, including Native actors, producers, and comedic subjects, in U.S., First Nations, and Canadian television and other media from the 1930s-2010s within the contexts of federal policy and social activism. 

Dr. Kevin Whalen is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Before his postdoc at Illinois, he earned a PhD in History at the University of California, Riverside. He has held fellowships and grants from the ACLS, the American Philosophical Society, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. In 2016, the University of Washington Press published his book, Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute’s Outing Program, 1900-1945. His articles have appeared in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Pacific Historical Review, and in edited volumes.