2018-19: Margaret Pearce
CNAIR hosted Margaret Pearce as its 2018–19 artist in residence. Pearce (Citizen Band Potawatomi) is a cartographer whose maps integrate Indigenous stories, place names, and placebased knowledge to represent place and space. During the year, she visited undergraduate courses, held regular office hours to consult on graduate students’ projects, participated in a panel cohosted by CNAIR and the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and gave the keynote at CNAIR’s research symposium. Pearce is currently at work on “Mississippi Dialogues: Fieldwork for an Interdisciplinary Cartographic Inquiry into the Indigenous Place Worlds of the Mississippi River.” The project creates not simply another representation of the river, but
a visual and literary narrative of the Indigenous knowledge of the river that foregrounds Indigenous
peoples’ ecological understanding and memories of the river and flooding.
Pearce’s talks and office hours were met with great enthusiasm from affiliates and students across
multiple departments, speaking to the ways her work and presence on campus engaged the community and galvanized and supported research on place-making.