Public Events --

Brownbag Lectures: The Siberian Legacy of Connecticut's Chief Big Eagle

Brownbag Lectures: The Siberian Legacy of Connecticut's Chief Big Eagle

• Location: ISM Research & Collections Center, Springfield
• Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

PRESENTED BY
Dr. Claude Clayton "Bud" Smith
Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, and
Claridge Writer-in-Residence and Professor of Creative Writing at Illinois College 

Chief Big Eagle (Aurelius H. Piper Sr.) was hereditary leader of Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugussett Indian Tribe from 1959 until his death last August. He served on many boards and commissions that fought for minority groups’ rights in New England. During the early 1980s the Chief gained considerable attention when he battled to preserve the tribe’s small state reservation and petitioned the Department of Interior for federal recognition. He was the subject of a book written by our guest speaker in 1985 (Quarter-Acre of Heartache), and both of them traveled to Russia in 1990 at the invitation of a Russian authority on American Indian literature. On their second trip in 1991, the Chief became the central figure at a powwow outside St. Petersburg where 150 Russians gathered to celebrate American Indian heritage. Claude Smith’s book Red Men in Red Square (1994) is an account of the “Indianists” of the former Soviet Union, some of whom are Native Siberian people who follow the ways of Native Americans. More recently he was co-editor/translator of The Way of Kinship (2003), the first anthology of Native Siberian literature in English. 

One of our Brownbag Lectures

Weekly lectures held at the Museum's Research and Collections Center. Lectures are usually held during lunchtime on Wednesday. The RCC is located at 1011 E. Ash Street in Springfield. Access to the building is from 10 ½ Street (between Ash and Laurel Streets), where there is ample visitor parking in the west parking lot. For more information, please call 217-785-0037. Brown Bag Lectures are free and open to the public.

Also, if you want to be informed of upcoming lectures by email, you can sign up for the brownbag announcement list.