Professor Keely Smith (Tulane University)
The Muscogee (hereafter spelled Mvskoke to reflect traditional spelling conventions) language is an endangered Indigenous language with fewer than 400 speakers who live primarily in Oklahoma and the American Southeast. Over the past thirty years, Mvskoke-speaking activists and scholars have worked to revitalize the language using historical Mvskoke language texts, but scholars have yet to explore the contested histories of these texts, their Mvskoke creators and contributors, and what they can reveal about Mvskoke sovereignty. In this 250th anniversary year of the American Revolution, this talk will explore the implications of U.S. nationhood for Mvskoke language and sovereignty. It will reveal the story of the Mvskoke communities who were responsible for the transcription and adoption of the written Mvskoke language from early partnerships between Mvskoke interpreters and Euro-American settlers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Mvskoke people who wrote in their own language to warn their communities about U.S. plans for allotment and statehood at the turn of the twentieth century. This project combs Mvskoke and English language archives to argue that contests over the written language sculpted diverse Mvskoke communities that sustained Mvskoke sovereignty despite threatening U.S. efforts to “civilize,” dispossess, and assimilate Native peoples.
Keely Smith is Assistant Professor of Native American History in the Department of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at Tulane University. She graduated with her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2024. Her research focuses on Native nations and languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Native South. Smith’s current book project, Relations in Writing: Contests Over Mvskoke Language, Literacy, and Communities, 1715-1907, tells the story of the Mvskoke communities who were responsible for the transcription and adoption of the written Mvskoke language from the Yamasee War to Oklahoma statehood. Smith’s other work includes a chapter in the forthcoming edited collection Gender in the Native South: A Reinterpretation of Women, Men, and Two-Spirit Peoples Before 1850 in production by University of Nebraska Press. In addition to academic writing and teaching, Smith is the administrative assistant for the Southeastern Indigenous Language Network, a community for Indigenous language teachers and speakers from the Gulf South.