IUPUI lecture to focus on religious movements' impact on gender roles in early North America
INDIANAPOLIS -- The IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute will continue its 2013-14 lecture and performance series with a presentation on the impact of religious movements on male-female relationships in early North America.
American historian James F. Brooks will present "Women, Men and Evangelism in the American Southwest" from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, in Room 409 of the IUPUI Campus Center, 420 University Blvd.
Based on a recent article in the American Historical Review, Brooks discusses four "big ideas" related to evangelical movements that swept across the borderlands of the North American Southwest from 750 to 1750.
"The Chaco Phenomenon, the Katsina religion, Franciscan Catholicism, and Po'pay's (Pueblo) Revolt each sought, through evangelical methods, to effect a dynamic reorganization of popular religious, cultural, and political beliefs," Brooks writes. "And each, while successful (some more enduringly than others), provoked popular resistance or rebellions in which power relations between women and men proved meaningful. The legacy of their successes and failures resonates in the regional peoples' memories and lifeways today."
Brooks is former president of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M., a center for advanced study in social sciences, humanities and indigenous arts. An interdisciplinary scholar of the indigenous and colonial past, Brooks has held professorial appointments at the University of Maryland, UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley.
Brooks' 2002 book "Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderland" earned more than a dozen national awards for scholarly excellence. The book focused on the traffic in women and children across the region as expressions of intercultural violence and accommodation.
