CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A panel of professors, including the grandson of author Dee Brown, will hold a symposium in his honor March 4 examining how the media have helped craft attitudes about American Indians. Brown played an influential role in reshaping perceptions about American Indians and westward expansion with his 1970 book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” For more than two decades leading up to its publication, Brown, who died in 2002, was a librarian and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The symposium will start at 7 p.m. in the Champaign City Council chambers, 102 N. Neil St., Champaign. The event is part of the university’s yearlong Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration, which marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating public schools. The symposium is co-sponsored by the commemoration organizing committee and the city of Champaign Human Relations Committee. It is free and open to the public.
Featured on the panel:
• John Sanchez, professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University, an expert on cultural aspects of the media, and a member of the Yaqui and Chiricahua Apache nations.
• Valerie Mathes, professor emeritus of history at City College of San Francisco and the author of three books on American Indians, including the recent “The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform.”
• Robert Hays, professor emeritus of journalism at Illinois, whose books include “A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on ‘the Indian Problem,’ 1860-1900.”
• Dee Brown’s grandson, Nicolas Proctor, a professor of history at Simpson College in Iowa, and the author of “Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South.”
The organizer of the symposium is Louis Liebovich, a professor of journalism at Illinois, who will serve as the moderator.
