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The Dream State of Lenape & the Indigenous Constitution with Dr. Philip Deloria

Deloria lecture flyer

Does American pluralism also require a single-minded embrace of the idea of the liberal rights-bearing subject, or could we also imagine a pluralism built around political collectivities?  It turns out that United States history has resources for considering group-based pluralism, in the form of American Indian nations.  An imaginative return to the first formal American treaty points directly to the key elements in what we might read as an Indigenous Constitution, hiding in plain sight within the U.S. Constitution.

Dr. Philip Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, gave this virtual lecture on Thursday, November 18th, 2021 from 4-5:30pm. 

This event was free and open to the public. 


Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States.  He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters.  Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018.  

Deloria is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.  He is former president of the American Studies Association, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions, and serves as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2022. 


This event was made possible by the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA), the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), and the Doctoral Consortium for the Literatures and Languages.