The History Workshop series wraps up with “Vanishing and Visible Indians: Modernity, Indigeneity, and a 480-Mile Footrace” presented by Tara Keegan

Friday, May 24, 2019
3:30–5:00 p.m.
375 McKenzie Hall, UO Campus

Food, dessert, and drinks provided

In the summer of 1927, the Redwood Highway Association and other local boosters sponsored the first annual “Redwood Highway Indian Marathon,” a week-long footrace beginning in San Francisco and ending in Grants Pass, Oregon. Designed as a tourist gambit to attract motorists to the new highway, the race featured only “members of the Indian race.”

This event serves as the main case study in Tara Keegan’s larger project about Indian survival and modernity in California, and the place of Native people in the construction of regional identity in the Pacific Northwest as the region developed into an industrial tourist destination. Keegan talk will outline her dissertation project and illustrate the central theme of intersecting indigeneity and modernity within the contexts of class and gender.