Ruth D. Ewing Lecture Presents: Dr. Kim TallBear

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | "Love Promiscuous Style: Unsettling Settler Love"

Settler-colonial society enforces the idea of promiscuous relating as lacking in purpose, as gratuitous. It uses the word to shame people for their desires and attractions. In the “settler sexuality” system, fidelity and commitment go hand-in-hand with scarcity. True love is supposedly romantic love, it is rare and yet it is the relationship that should forever ground our adult lives to the exclusion of other sexual/romantic connections, and even sometimes to the exclusion of platonic relations.

In this talk, Kim TallBear combines stories, short creative nonfiction vignettes called 100s, and critical analyses derived from sexuality, anthropological, and environmental studies. She considers how to make love and kin promiscuously without privileging romance, biological connection, and human connection, but neither denigrating nor foreclosing generous human romantic and/or sexual connections when mutually desired and consensual. She considers how a multiplicity of beings—human lovers, friends, family, and other-than-human kin—together constitute an abundant collection of important relations.

Kim TallBear is Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is also a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow. Dr. TallBear is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Building on her research on the role of technoscience in settler colonialism, Dr. TallBear also studies the colonization of Indigenous sexuality. She is a regular commentator in US, Canadian, and UK media outlets on issues related to Indigenous peoples, science, and technology as well as Indigenous sexualities. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota.

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About the Ruth D. Ewing Lecture Series:
Alumna Ruth Ewing '37 (1915-2014), whose studies concentrated on social sciences while at Bennington, was also a parent of an alumnus, as well as a distinguished trustee from 1979 to 1982. In 1997, the College's trustees named the Social Science Lecture Series for Mrs. Ewing in recognition of her unstinting generosity and esteemed service to Bennington. We are deeply grateful that Mrs. Ewing and her husband James Ewing went on to support the endowed Ruth D. Ewing '37 Social Science Lecture Series throughout the rest of their lives, bringing special guest lecturers in the social sciences to Bennington College today and in perpetuity.