Exploring the treatment of Utah Sen. Arthur Watkins’ policies in Pulitzer-Prize winning author Louise Erdrich’s book “The Night Watchman,” Dr. P. Jane Hafen will present “’It Ain’t Real Estate’: Tribal Sovereignty in Pulitzer-Prize Author, Louise Erdrich, and Utah Senator Arthur Watkins” in Utah Tech University Library’s 41st annual Juanita Brooks Lecture Series.
The address is set to take place at 6 p.m. on April 11 in Utah Tech’s Dunford Auditorium, located in the Browning Learning Resource Center. A question-and-answer period with the speaker will follow the presentation. The lecture is free and open to the public.
“I am excited to attend Dr. P. Jane Hafen’s (Taos Pueblo) lecture in April,” Dr. Cassie Clark, assistant professor of history at Utah Tech, said. “Her extensive research and work regarding Indigenous history and identities, Mormon perspective, and the broader Southwest will enable the Utah Tech and surrounding Washington County community to expand their knowledge about the area and its many peoples, places and complex pasts.”
In her exploration of “The Night Watchman,” Hafen will explain how Watkins, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, pushed for policies terminating federal status of Native American tribes, reducing government obligations to the tribes.
A professor emerita of English at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a Frances C. Allen Fellow at the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library, Hafen, received the William H. Morris Teaching Award for UNLV’s College of Liberal Arts and the UNLV Foundation Distinguished Teaching Award. Additionally, she edited “Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems and The Sun Dance Opera” by Zitkala-Ša as well as two collections of essays, “Critical Insights: Louise Erdrich” and “Essays on American Indian and Mormon History.” Hafen also co-edited “The Great Plains Reader” and is author of “Reading Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine” and articles and book chapters about American Indian Literature. Her critical edition “Help Indians Help Themselves: The Later Writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin” (Zitkala-Ša), was published in January 2020.
The Juanita Brooks Lecture Series celebrates the life and work of its namesake. Brooks, a historian whose work is well received by other historians and changed the landscape of LDS history, became a role model for Latter-day Saint historians and women in research and academia. The annual lecture series is possible thanks to an endowment from Obert C. Tanner. For more information about this lecture series, visit library.utahtech.edu/special_collections/juanita_brooks.html.