Prof Robbie Richardson inaugurates the Department’s Indigenous Studies Speaker Series

On October 8th, a packed lecture room of professors, graduate, and undergraduate students gathered at the Lincoln Center campus for the first presentation in the Fordham English Department’s Indigenous Studies speaker series, co-sponsored by the Office of Equity and Inclusion. Professor Robbie Richardson (Princeton University) presented on his ongoing research project investigating how Indigenous objects and material culture from the Americas were appropriated by Europeans and the British in the eighteenth century. Tobacco was the material at the center of the talk. Richardson discussed that while tobacco leaves were imported across the Atlantic, the spiritual, embodied practice of smoking tobacco within Indigenous cultures was disregarded in favor of a smoking culture based on individual pleasure and mass commercialization. He recalled finding a collection of long-discarded clay pipes—how tobacco in Britain was originally consumed—embedded in the muddy banks of the Thames, a lasting reminder of the world’s first mass-produced disposable product. His research considers how British culture wrangled with their addiction to a product derived from an Indigenous practice, either by intentionally eliding these origins and disavowing any transcultural connections, or protesting tobacco use due to its Indigenous associations.

Richardson also discussed how using a critical Indigenous studies perspective to reconsider this transferral of material culture presents a productively unsettling dynamic to approaching this history, including considering the pipes traditionally used to smoke tobacco as “vital texts” to be read. Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing simultaneously from Indigenous and colonial epistemologies, is a productive concept for how Richardson approaches his research, which draws on a varietal blend of archival documents, other Indigenous object-texts such as wampum, European eighteenth-century advertising, canonical novels including Robinson Crusoe, and works by contemporary Indigenous artists. His thought-provoking presentation provided much to consider for anyone working in Indigenous, eighteenth century, postcolonial, ecocritical, and comparative literature studies while also being a deeply engaging talk for everyone in attendance. The presentation marked a successful beginning to the Department’s initiative to generate greater discussion surrounding Indigenous studies, with future talks promising further new insights and intellectual opportunity.

Photo Credit: “At Thanksgiving, Professor Robbie Richardson on Indigenous Literature and History.” Princeton Alumni Weekly.