CENTER FOR NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS RESEARCH

Winter 2026 Keynote

Thursday March 12th, 5 - 7 PM

Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women's Labor Histories 

In her award-winning book, Refusing Settler Domesticity, historian Caitlin Keliiaa traces the lives of Native women in the early 20th-century. For this book talk, Keliiaa delves into the largely untold history of the Bay Area Outing Program, which coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor as live-in domestic workers across the San Francisco Bay Area. In exchange for room, board, and meager pay, Native women and girls as young as twelve cooked, cleaned, and lived in the homes of their employers. Keliiaa shows how, despite their oppressive living and working conditions, they strategically resisted the worst aspects of outing, including Indian child removal, sexual surveillance, criminalization, and exploitation. Throughout, they forged social connections and navigated relationships to refuse domestication and assert their agency. Refusing Settler Domesticity serves as an indictment of the Indian boarding school system and illuminates the history of urban Indians, California, and the West.

 

TIME: 5-7pm

LOCATION: Trienens Forum, KRESGE 1515

Reception at 6:15pm in hallway

 

 

Submit Research Symposium Poster Topics!

DUE: Friday, March 13th

Posters are a way for you to share current work with symposium attendees which include community leaders, TCUs, faculty, students, and staff. Topics should be relevant to CNAIR’s mission & vision, Indigenous partnered projects, Indigenous methodology, or Native American and Indigenous Studies. CNAIR is an interdisciplinary space and are open to a wide range of project work, including scholarship and community project work.

We welcome submissions from faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and community members at Northwestern University, TCUs, or in the Chicagoland area. Individuals at other institutions or community organizations are encouraged to submit! Presenters will be assigned to one time slot on either April 9th or April 10th.