Leon Jett Memorial Lecture with Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Chippewa)

Join Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Chippewa), author and Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Indian Studies and History at UCLA, for an important discussion about hip-hop music by Native artists. Mays is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (2018), An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (2021), and City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (2022).

His work explores three questions: What is the relationship between blackness and indigeneity? How does dispossession in cities shape the lives of Black and Indigenous peoples? How can we imagine and put into praxis a world in the aftermath of settler colonialism and white supremacy?

The Leon Jett Memorial Lecture is named for the Eiteljorg’s former manager of public programs who sought to elevate multicultural programming at the museum.