American and Indigenous Studies Program, Center for Indigenous Studies, and Montgomery Place Present

“Once and still upon this land (For Montgomery Place)”: A Poetry Reading with Bonney Hartley

Bonney Hartley is a ’25 MFA-Creative Writing candidate at Institute of American Indian Arts and holds an MSocSci in International Relations from University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and serves as a Tribal repatriation specialist. She is a founding member of Mohican Writers Circle and has forthcoming work in the Boundless exhibit catalogue (Smith College Mead Museum), The Last Milkweed (Tupelo Press), and North Berkshire Landscapes: A Celebration (Tupelo Press &Williamstown Rural Lands). Bonney lives within Mohican homelands in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Artist’s Statement:
My piece is offered to foreground and activate Returning Home with an archaeological reflection through layers of home, the land, inhabitation, removal, memory, and continuance.

All events require separate registration. Exhibition viewing is not included in event registration.

Exhibition Viewing Hours:
April 6th & 7th, 1:00-5:00pm (timed entry every 15 minutes - register here)
April 10-12th, 1:30-4:00pm

Schedule of Events:
April 6th, 1:30pm: Opening Remarks & Activation, poetry reading by Bonney Hartley (reservation required, doors open at 1:00pm)
April 6th, 4:00pm: Cara Romero in conversation with Suzanne Kite
April 7th, 3:00pm: Dana Claxton Artist Talk, on zoom, seating available at MP visitor's center. Register for the webinar here.
April 10th, 6:30pm: Cara Romero: Following the Light, Preston Cinema, Bard College. A short documentary on the work & practice of Cara Romero. No registration required.

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Returning Home is the first small scale contemporary Native photography exhibition to take place in the Montgomery Place Mansion at Bard College. The exhibition addresses long standing Indigenous child removal policies and practices of Canada and the United States, whose governments strategically implemented the kidnapping of Native children to be sent to Indian boarding schools during the 19th and 20th centuries to sever familial ties and dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land and lifeways.  By introducing the history of the United States’ settler colonial past and ongoing present alongside the works of four contemporary Native photographers—Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena/Jewish), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nation), Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke(Crow))—and poet Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee), this exhibition provides narratives of resistance, resilience, dissent, subversion, memorialization, and what Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance,” that disrupt historic and contemporary notions that Native peoples are helpless victims who are unfit to raise their own children – often infantilized by a paternalistic US government through colonial welfare practices. This exhibition is  an intervention in a  house museum whose history is intertwined with the forced removal of the Mohican peoples in early colonial New York.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://rethinkingplace.bard.edu/returning-home/.

Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Montgomery Place Estate

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