White Women Demanding Their Right To Speak: Native American Scholar To Speak at Aurora University March 14

AURORA , Ill. —“Demanding a Right to Speak: White Women’s Interventions in the Indian Removal Debates,” a presentation and discussion, will be hosted by Aurora University at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 14.

Alisse Portnoy, associate professor, Department of English Language and Literature Faculty Associate, American Culture Program at the University of Michigan, will speak. The program is free to the public at AU’s Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures at Dunham Hall, 1400 Marseillaise Place in Aurora.

Portnoy will discuss how and why nearly 1,500 women from seven northern states participated in women’s first national, collective political activism in U.S. history.

In 1829, Catharine Beecher publicly urged European American women to petition the United States federal government to protest the forced removal of Native Americans from their southern lands.

Over the next two years, nearly 1,500 women from seven northern states participated in women's first national, collective political activism in U.S. history. Female petitioners knew they were "intruding" in "unique" and "extraordinary ways"; they asked forgiveness from U.S. congressmen even as they demanded what they called their "right to speak on the subject."

Portnoy explores the rich, compelling petitions that the women submitted to the federal government in the context of the national and highly contentious Indian removal debates. She argues that the ways these women interpreted the Indian removal debates made their participation appear not only reasonable, but even natural and obligatory. 

Portnoy is interested in the ways people use language, written or spoken, in debates about civil rights. She teaches courses on U.S. civil rights movements, language and power, rhetorical theory and criticism, and U.S. literature, as well as writing courses and first-year seminars.

Her first book, Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Harvard University Press, 2005), links antebellum Indian removal debates with simultaneous debates about the abolition of slavery and African colonization, revealing ways that European American women negotiated prohibitions to participate collectively in national politics for the first time in United States history. 

Call 630-844-7843 or visit museum@aurora.edu for more information.

- END -