Jessica Arnett to Discuss Alaska Native Sovereignty Aug. 14 at WWU

The recipient of the 2015 James W. Scott Research Fellowship, Jessica Leslie Arnett, will speak about Alaskan Native sovereignty during the talk, “Between Empires and Frontiers: Sovereignty, Land, Labor and Belonging in Territorial Alaska” at 3 p.m. on Friday August 14 in Western Washington University’s Western Libraries Special Collections on the sixth floor of Wilson Library.

This event is free and open to the public.

Arnett’s research examines territorial Alaska as a geopolitical space in which the legal and political frameworks of settler colonialism and imperialism converged. Her research addresses ways in which Alaska Natives leveraged the tensions produced by this entanglement in their claims on sovereignty, land and belonging.

Arnett is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, a 2015-2016 Andrew Mellon Dissertation Fellow, and a short-term Newberry Library Consortium for American Indian Studies Fellow. Her research interests were shaped by her own experience of being raised in Alaska from an early age.            

Prior to her presentation, Arnett will spend a week conducting research at Western’s Center for Pacific Northwest Studies as part of the opportunity given to her by the James W. Scott Research Fellowship. The fellowship was established to promote the use of Western’s archival collections and to forward scholarly understandings of the Pacific Northwest. Funding for the fellowship is awarded in honor of the late James W. Scott, a founder and the first director of the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies and a noted scholar of the Pacific Northwest.

For more information about this event or the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, contact Ruth Steele, the CPNWS’s Archivist, at (360) 650-7747 or Ruth.Steele@wwu.edu.