The History Department invites you to this year’s Arthur G. Pettit Memorial Lecture, “Bodily Natures, Natural Bodies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Motherhood, and the Dispossessive Politics of Reproduction,” delivered by Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles, Professor of History at North Carolina State University tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 3 from 4:30–6 p.m., in the Timothy Fuller Event Space in Tutt Library. Light refreshments will be served.

In 1889, a doctor named A.F. King weighed in on a debate among his colleagues about whether or not childbirth was natural: “If we would understand natural parturition, pure and simple, we must study primitive woman – woman of the forest and the field.”

What did King and his contemporaries mean by natural? What did it have to do with race and colonialism?

This talk examines late nineteenth century ideas about the naturalness – or not – of childbirth, focusing on how King’s contemporaries tapped into racist ideas of Indigenous birth, accumulated through settler politics of knowledge production about Indigenous people in the US West. By recognizing the politics of gender, race, nature, and reproduction at the center of settler colonialism as a dispossessive power structure, this history contextualizes contemporary debates about the naturalness of birth, biological motherhood, and other reproductive functions.

Sponsored by the Arthur G. Pettit Memorial Lecture Fund and the History Department. The Arthur G. Pettit Memorial Fund for Lecturers was established by family and friends in honor of Arthur G. Pettit, a distinguished scholar, teacher, and historian who was Associate Professor of History at Colorado College until his death in 1977.

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