Tlingit art and story constitute a superb, ancient, and ever-evolving tradition. In the last century, however, many attempts to describe the fundamental features of this tradition have used vocabulary borrowed from the English language. This talk presents some of the complex thinking that Tlingit tradition bearers past and present have worked out in their own language to discuss representation, symbolism, and the relationship between human and non-human acts of creation. The result is an aesthetics inseparable from cosmology, based on a deeply considered idea of what it means to exist in a world where everything is alive.

About the Speaker

Matthew Spellberg is the founding Dean and Chair of Literature at Outer Coast, a new institution of higher education in Sitka, Alaska. He is an Editor-at-Large at Cabinet Magazine, Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages grant, and a board member of the Sharing Our Knowledge Conference in Southeast Alaska. He is the creator of the Dream Parliament, a project on the history and practice of collective dream-sharing featuring collaborators from across the United States and Canada. A learner of Tlingit, he frequently teaches for Outer Coast's free and open online Alaska Native Language courses. He is co-editor, with Ishmael Hope, of a book of Tlingit texts forthcoming from Harvard/Dumbarton Oaks.

Mitch Jurasek (moderator) is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He studies 19th-century American literatures and their afterlives. Informed by Indigenous studies, philosophy, ecological and queer theories, his work aims to contribute to anti-colonial practices and futures. At Columbia, he facilitates the Literature, Culture, and Environment Colloquium within his department as well as the University-wide Environmental Humanities Working Group in partnership with the Center for Science and Society. Prior to joining Columbia’s department, Mitch worked in his home state of Alaska at Outer Coast, a new higher education institution that reimagines education by centering place-based and Indigenous thought. While at Outer Coast on the island of Sitka—the land of the Sheetʼká ḵwáan Tlingit—he began learning and engaging with Lingít language and thought.

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