Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Sarah Vogel “The Wild Ride: Keepseagle Class Action and the Decades-Long Fight of Native American Ranchers and Farmers”

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms aremeaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

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Sarah Vogel is an attorney, advocate, and author of "The Farmer's Lawyer," a memoir about her landmark class action lawsuit, Coleman v. Block, which she brought against the federal government on behalf of 240,000 farmers facing foreclosure during the 1980s farm crisis. She is an advocate for family farmers, women, and Native Americans, and served two terms as North Dakota Commissioner of Agriculture. She is currently a member of the Agriculture Subcommittee to USDA Equity Commission.