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The 2002 Middelburg conference

In collaboration with the Netherlands American Studies Association, ACSN organized a three-day conference on the politics and representation of North America's First Nations in the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg in May 2002. Not only did non-natives give their views on native issues, aboriginal people from North American spoke about their experiences from within. Particularly interesting was the panel discussion on Nunavut with Clara Aupalu. The Dutch anthropologists Jaarich Oosten (Leiden) and Cornelius Remie (Nijmegen), members of the Research Group Circumpolar Cultures play a guiding role in oral history projects in co-operation with Arctic College in Iqaluit and Laval University in Quebec.

The award-winning novelist Aritha van Herk gave a keynote address on the British fur trader Peter Fidler, who spent two winters with First Nations tribes. She examined Fidler's sojourn with the Piegan and the extent to which imagination enables a cross-apprehension of what matters about living.

Algonquin-Irish Yvette Nolan, playwright, director and actor, did not only talk about being an invisible aboriginal in increasingly intolerant times but she also acted splendidly in her one-woman performance "Ghost Dances" Three Movements.

To view the program of the conference, click here. The proceedings of this conference will be published in 2003.