In this talk, professor Heather Miyano Kopelson (University of Alabama) will consider how placing the snippets of text about Bermuda's first enslaved Africans and Indians in conversation with visual images created by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal that the unwilling newcomers brought essential skills and knowledge that transformed the colonial environment, both materially and spiritually. English written descriptions of early colonial life obscured and omitted the coerced and vital labor of the people they enslaved and it is rare that we can know with certainty what any one individual did or experienced. However, it is still possible and indeed necessary to sketch out the gendered activities of the earliest Indian and African women and men and to trace how they changed the world around them as they worked to recreate identity and community in Bermuda.

Location:	Great Room, Honors Residential College, Ambler Johnston Hall
Sponsor:	Department of History
Contact:	Dennis Hidalgo dhidalgo@vt.edu 231-8370/(763) 257-7023
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