In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, Karenne Wood, a member of the Monacan Indian Nation and an anthropologist, will be the speaker at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and at the Virginia Air and Space Center on Nov. 7.
Media wishing to attend Wood’s NASA Langley Colloquium Lecture Series presentation should contact Eric Gillard in the Office of Communications at 757-864-7423 or at eric.s.gillard@nasa.gov for badging and access.
Wood will also speak that night, Nov. 7, at 7:30 p.m. at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia, as part of the center’s Sigma Series of free public lectures.
A Long History Retold
Wood’s lecture, “Stone, Bone and Clay: Virginia Indians’ History of 18,000 Years,” will examine the deep history of American Indian presence in what we now call Virginia and consider how our understanding of that history has changed with archaeological discoveries.
Her presentation will also analyze the ways in which that story has been presented and how native people have come to be seen as people of the past through the interpretations of museums and historians, policy makers and popular media. The talk considers these issues from a native perspective and offers ideas intended to expand the story we tell about Virginia’s first people.
Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation who directs Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from George Mason University and a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of Virginia. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher and at the Association on American Indian Affairs as a repatriation specialist.
In 2015, she was honored as one of Virginia’s Women in History. Wood is the author of two poetry collections, “Markings on Earth” (2000) and “Weaving the Boundary” (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as “The Kenyon Review,” “Orion” and “Shenandoah.”
For more information about the Colloquium Lectures at NASA Langley, visit:
https://colloqsigma.larc.nasa.gov
