Nationally Known Scholars to Headline OU's ‘Teach-In on Native Americans and the Constitutional Order’

NORMAN, OKLA. – Twelve nationally renowned historians, law professors and political scientists will speak at the University of Oklahoma’s 2023 Teach-In, a single-day lecture series designed to engage the broader community on civic education through history.

This year’s Teach-In will focus on “Native Americans and the Constitutional Order” and will be held Wednesday, March 8, with lectures taking place at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, 2401 Chautauqua Ave., on OU’s Norman campus. Opening remarks will begin at 9 a.m., with the final presentation at 3:15 p.m., which includes a participant roundtable.

This year’s event marks the return of the Teach-In, which began in 2012, but due to the pandemic, has not been held since 2020. The event has attracted some of the nation’s leading scholars, practitioners and commentators to OU to discuss historical, social and political events that have shaped America’s heritage. The daylong event is hosted by the OU Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage and is open to the public at no cost to participants.

Presentations include:

• “Teaching Native American Responses to American Political Ideas,” 
  Burke Hendrix, University of Oregon
• “The Mohegan Case and Imperial Constitutionalism,”
  Craig Yirush, University of California, Los Angeles
• “The Marshall Trilogy and Foundational Principles of Federal Indian Law,”
  Lindsay Robertson, University of Oklahoma College of Law
• “Native Peoples, Original Constitutional Understandings, and the Problem of Historical Change,”
  Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School
• “From Petitions to Parchment: Native Petitions and Constitution Making in the Long Nineteenth Century,”
  Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University
• “Tribal Representation & Assimilative Colonialism,”
  Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, Stanford Law School
• “Considering American Indian Constitutional Rights through the Interpretive Lens of International Law,”
  Kristen Carpenter, University of Colorado Law School
• “Tribes and Criminal Justice in the United States: The Broader Context,”
  Kevin Washburn, University of Iowa College of Law
• “Indigenous Sovereignty, Common Law, and the Natural Law,”
  Samuel Piccolo, Ph.D. candidate, University of Notre Dame
• “Water, Climate, and Tribal Sovereignty in Indian Country,”
  M. Alexander Pearl, University of Oklahoma College of Law
• “The Anti-Removal Constitution: Native Legal Theories and the Origins of Federal Indian Law,”
  Tanner Allread, Ph.D. candidate, Stanford University
• “Little Kingdoms: Legalized Security and Federal Indian Policy During WWII,”
  Bonnie Cherry, Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Berkeley School of Law

Reservations are required for all sessions, subject to availability. For more information, including speaker bios, reservations and accommodations, visit ou.edu/teach-in.