Dr. Blaire Morseau
1855 Professor of Great Lakes Anishinaabe Knowledge, Spiritualities, and Cultural Practices, Michigan State University
“Sacred Servers and Cyber Star Charts: Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the Great Lakes Region”
12:30 – 1:30pm, Weitz 236
- Slides from Blaire Morseau. “Sacred Servers and Cyber Star Charts: Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the Great Lakes Region.” Day of DH 2025, Carleton College.
About the Speaker:
Blaire Morseau is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Digital Humanities and American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Before becoming a professor, she worked as her tribe’s first full-time archivist, launching an online collections and dictionary website called Wiwkwébthëgen using Potawatomi cultural protocols of access and traditional knowledge labels. She recently released an edited volume featuring the collection of antique birch bark books written by 19th century Potawatomi author, Simon Pokagon, titled, As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in their Contexts, published by MSU Press. Dr. Morseau consults on various exhibitions and collaborative programming for archives, libraries, and museums around the country including the Field Museum of Natural History, The Newberry Library, and The Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She is a co-director of the Indigenous Chicago project, a multifaceted and ongoing collaboration between the Newberry Library, the Chicago American Indian Community, and tribal nations who have ancestral ties to Chicago. Her research interests are in Indigenous science fiction and futurisms, traditional cultural and ecological knowledge, digital heritage, and Native counter-mapping. Her newest book project to be published in May 2025 with the University of Arizona Press, is titled Mapping Neshnabé Futurity: Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters. The monograph investigates how Native peoples in the Great Lakes region leverage their traditional knowledge in environmental activism and in creative works of speculative fiction to reclaim Indigenous space and tribal sovereignty.