Podcast Series with Professor Jaquetta Shade-Johnson: Episode 1

Hi Everyone,

We hope you enjoyed the first podcast segments of our inaugural podcast series with Kong Bijoya Sawian on Khasi culture and matrilineality. I am excited to announce a very special guest for our next podcast, Professor Jaquetta Shade-Johnson, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the Department of English. With Professor Shade-Johnson, we will be exploring Cherokee culture, its origins, matrilineality, the role of women, her experience as a Cherokee woman, and her university courses.

As shared on her website, professor Shade-Johnson has a very rich background and teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, indigenous literature, digital storytelling, and Native American and Indigenous studies. Her research at the intersections of cultural rhetorics, indigenous studies, and environmental humanities is primarily focused on how indigenous communities make meaning through rhetorical, embodied, and storied relationships with the land. She currently serves as faculty advisor for the MU indigenous student organization, Four Directions, and as a founding editor in the editorial collective for Spark: a 4C4Equality Journal, a digital, open-access, peer-reviewed journal addressing activism in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies.

Given the extensive amount of content in this podcast, we have split it into four manageable parts. In this first episode, Professor Shade-Johnson shares her inside perspectives on Cherokee culture as a whole and the Cherokee tribe’s close relationship with the land. In addition, she shares a very interesting version of the Cherokee origin story, which is fascinating. I encourage you to check it out.

I hope you enjoy this first episode and find it informative!

Gabby