POSTPONED! — Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small Business Ownership and the Making of Economic Sovereignty

UPDATED on April 15 – This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled during the fall 2019 semester.

Courtney Lewis, author of Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small Business Ownership and the Making of Economic Sovereignty, will speak at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 17, at UNC Asheville’s Highsmith Student Union, in the French Broad Room (room 125). This event is free and open to everyone.

This event is sponsored by the university’s departments of management and accountancy, American Indian and indigenous studies, and sociology and anthropology. The event organizers provide this description:

Dr. Lewis (enrolled Cherokee Nation) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina – Columbia in the Department of Anthropology (housed) and the Institute for Southern Studies. She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the Department of Anthropology and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University–Middletown, CT.

Her research areas include: economic anthropology, indigenous rights, economic justice, globalization, political economy, economic sovereignty, economic stability, public anthropology, food sovereignty, tribal economic development, American Indian studies, race and entrepreneurship, and economic colonialism.

Her current work is in economic  development for Native Nations in the United States and, consequently, issues of sovereignty related to—and based upon the necessity of— economic sustainability and stability. Specifically, her research is focused on small businesses located on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina. Her fieldwork took place during the height of the Great Recession and reveals that small businesses provide a crucial impact on reservation economies, especially during a time of economic crisis. This research also highlights the historical presence of small businesses and entrepreneurs on reservations and answers the questions of how the boundaries that Native Nations work within—land, legal, representational—impact these small businesses; how these boundaries are then transformed by these businesses (e.g. impacts on issues of sovereignty); and how these transformations can truly alter the landscape of a Native Nation in both figuratively and literally.