Date
From April 11 through April 15, 2022, the University of Oklahoma will present Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity: Spatial Storytelling with Emergent Technologies.
Organized by Dr. Laura Harjo, the exhibition presents elements of Muscogee (Creek) people’s original homelands in Alabama using visualization technologies including digital modeling, Geographic Information System mapping and spatial analysis, as well as a 3D physical model to share insights about these ancestral lands.
The Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity exhibition takes an initial step to model the spatial arrangement of Muscogee tribal towns and territories at local and regional scales. The exhibition is part of Harjo’s larger project of exploring Muscogee knowledge and “emergence geographies.” Through this work, Harjo seeks to surface past and future geographies—whether concrete, emphemeral, metaphysical and virtual—of Muscogee Tribal Towns found in pre-removal Alabama and post-removal Oklahoma.
Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar, an associate professor of Native American Studies, and an affiliate faculty member in Regional and City Planning at the University of Oklahoma. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in geography, and her scholarly inquiry is at the intersection of geography and critical ethnic studies with “community” as an analytic focus. She is author of the award-winning book Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which employs Mvskoke epistemologies and Indigenous feminisms to grapple with a community praxis of futurity.
The “Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity” exhibition was made possible with seed funding from the OU Vice President for Research and Partnerships’ inaugural Social Science and Humanities Seed Grant program. To execute this stage of her larger project, Harjo partnered with faculty, staff and students from the University of Oklahoma Gibbs College of Architecture.
The exhibition will be on display in the Gould Hall Buskuhl Gallery on the OU-Norman campus from April 11 – 15, 2022 (8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. each day). An opening reception will be held from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 11th. Light refreshments will be served.
For more information or to request accommodations, contact Laura Harjo at harjo@ou.edu.
Exhibition Organizer
Contributors
OU College of Arts & Sciences, Native American Studies
OU-Tulsa Urban Design Studio
OU-Tulsa Operations / Paint Shop
OU Gibbs College of Architecture
OU Price College of Business
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
Gibbs Construction Science and Architecture students recently traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to compete in the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) Region 8 Student Competition. The team partnered with Czech Technical University and secured third place in the Design-Build category.
Gibbs College is pleased to present the exhibition Vollendorf in Oklahoma: The Architecture of Dean Bryant Vollendorf during the Spring 2026 semester. It will be on display in Gould Hall, on the OU-Norman Campus, from February 16, 2026 - March 13, 2026.
