Bright Lights Revealed: One Tribe’s Fight to Protect their Land and Future, at Tulane University

“Bright Lights Revealed: One Tribe’s Fight to Protect Their Land and Future”
A roundtable discussion with Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, Cherie Matherne, and Christine Verdin moderated by Dr. Elizabeth Ellis and introduced by Dr. Laura Kelley
Tuesday, October 15
6–8 p.m.
Tulane University Rogers Memorial Chapel, 1229 Broadway St, New Orleans
Admission is free, and registration is encouraged.

Recently the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities announced The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South by Dr. Elizabeth Ellis as the 2024 Humanities Book of the Year.

This roundtable discussion, moderated by Ellis and taking place at Tulane University, will explore the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe’s actions to preserve their land, promote their heritage, and plan for the future. This panel will be introduced by Dr. Laura Kelley. Additional panelists include tribal members Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, Cherie Matherne, and Christine Verdine.

About the Speakers:

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee has substantial experience in Indian law, election law, policy matters, voting rights, and status clarification of tribes. She is a clinical professor of law, the faculty director of the Indian Legal Program, and the director of the Indian Legal Clinic at ASU.

Professor Ferguson-Bohnee has testified before the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the Louisiana State Legislature regarding tribal recognition, and has successfully assisted four Louisiana tribes in obtaining state recognition. Professor Ferguson-Bohnee has represented tribal clients in administrative, state, federal, and tribal courts, as well as before state and local governing bodies and proposed revisions to the Real Estate Disclosure Reports to include tribal provisions. She has assisted in complex voting rights litigation on behalf of tribes, and she has drafted state legislative and congressional testimony on behalf of tribes with respect to voting rights’ issues.
Before joining ASU in 2007, Professor Ferguson-Bohnee clerked for Judge Betty Binns Fletcher of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and was an associate in the Indian Law and Tribal Relations Practice Group at Sacks Tierney P.A. in Phoenix. As a Fulbright Scholar to France, she researched French colonial relations with Louisiana Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Professor Ferguson-Bohnee, a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe, serves as the Native Vote Election Protection Coordinator for the State of Arizona.

Cherie Matherne

Cherie Matherne was born and raised in Pointe-au-Chien, where she still lives today with her husband and three children, witnessing first-hand the coastal changes to her tribal community. She is a member of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe and has been their cultural heritage and resiliency coordinator for the past four years. Matherne is also PACITs Elections Commissioner, she sits on the Governors council for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, PACITs Tribal liaison for the LSU Ag Center, and recently added to the working group for the 2029 CPRA Coastal Master Plan. Matherne is currently an undergraduate student working on her Bachelor’s degree in political science.

Christine Verdin

Christine Verdin was born and raised in Pointe-au-Chien. She is a graduate of South Terrebonne and received her Bachelor of Arts in education and Masters in early childhood and administration from Nicholls State University. She is the principal of the newly formed Ecole Pointe au Chien, a French immersion school that was established in 2023.
Verdin has served as the Tribe’s delegate to the National Congress of American Indians. In 2010, she advocated for a resolution to support coordination with state recognized tribes in responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill at NCAI. She has also highlighted the Tribe’s issues before the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Her first language is Indian French, and she is very proud to have opened the first immersion school in the area for children to maintain the language.

Dr. Elizabeth Ellis

Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South,” the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 Humanities Book of the Year.

She teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous Studies. She is a scholar of early North America with a focus on diplomacy, borderlands, cross cultural exchange, and Indigenous politics. Ellis received her B.A. from Tulane University and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“The Great Power of Small Nations” examines the formation of Native American nations in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In this work, Ellis argues that Indigenous migration and immigration practices helped create powerful and resilient Native nations, and that these Native southerners shaped and limited the extent of European colonization during the eighteenth century. The Great Power of Small Nations has received additional awards from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Her current research interests include Indigenous migration, borderlands, early Native American art, Indian slavery, and 20th-century Native American politics. She is presently working on projects on early Native American iconography and a long history of the Peoria Tribe. Her ongoing collaborative work includes, the Reclaiming Stories Project(Link is external) , the “Unsettled Refuge” working group on Indigenous histories of North American Sanctuary, and the “ Indigenous Borderlands of North America(Link is external) ” research project. She is also the primary investigator for the 2023-2024 Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Indigenous Futures in Times of Crisis” at New York University and Princeton University.

In addition to her work on early American history, Ellis also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and politics. She is committed to tribally engaged historical work and collaborative research practices that support Native self-determination. Ellis is Peewaalia and an enrolled citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. She currently serves as the Tribal History Liaison for her nation.

Dr. Laura Kelley

Dr. Kelley is a historian and professor at Tulane University where she specializes in U.S. history. In 2005, Dr. Kelley met Patty Ferguson-Bohnee and was asked to be the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe’s historian for their petition for federal recognition. Since 2005, Dr. Kelley has traveled all over the world collecting documents and images to bolster the tribe’s petition, and has done extensive research piecing together the tribe’s early history.
Dr. Kelley continues to work with the tribe today, and has developed a service learning program where she brings her students down to Pointe-au-Chien to do research for the tribe, as well as recovery efforts following Hurricane Ida.