Refusing Repair: Conversations on Kinship

Jodi Byrd (Cornell University and Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma)
Ethan Madarieta (Syracuse University)

Jodi Byrd presents a public seminar that, in lieu of the academic talk, asks us to create knowledge together through conversations on indigeneity, kinship, refusal, and critiques of repair from Indigenous perspectives. We interrogate, for example, what is erased or elided by framing ongoing dispossession, slavery, and structures of elimination that affect and delimit Black and Indigenous lives and deaths as “damage” that can be “fixed,” “mended,” or “repaired?” What are the politics of reconciliation, so often posed as a project of repair, and how might we understand Indigenous refusal of such projects? What is kinship, and how might it unsettle the logic of repair and popular conceptions of what constitutes indigeneity?

The seminar will attend to these questions and more, beginning with a conversation between Professors Byrd and Madarieta, followed by public discussion on the above-mentioned themes.

Those interested in pre-reading materials (optional) before conversation are invited to explore this selection of texts.

This event is part of Syracuse Symposium’s year-long series on “Repair.”

Learn more