Laurie Hovell McMillin, '84
Tibet
in English, English
in Tibet: Self-Presentation in Tibet and the Diaspora. Hardcover,
260 pages; Palgrave Macmillan, November 2001
Laurie McMillin is associate professor of rhetoric, composition, and religion at Oberlin College and has traveled among Tibetan communities since 1982.
"This book explores two kinds of self-presentation in Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora: that of British writers in their travel texts to Tibet from 1774 to 1910 and that of Tibetans in recent autobiographies in English. McMillin argues that Tibet and the Anglophone West have had a long, complex, and convoluted relationship that can be explored, in part, through analysis of English language writings. The first part of the book explores how a myth of epiphany in Tibet comes to dominate English texts of travel in Tibet, while the second part considers how Tibetan autobiographers writing in English have responded and resisted Western images of them."
Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town. Paperback,
308 pages, University of Wisconsin Press, March 2006
In Buried Indians, McMillin presents the struggle of her hometown,
Trempealeau, Wisconsin, to determine whether platform mounds atop Trempealeau
Mountain constitute
authentic
Indian mounds. This dispute, as she subtly demonstrates, reveals much about
the attitude and interaction — past and present — between the white
and Indian inhabitants of this Midwestern town.
McMillin’s account, rich in detail and sensitive to current political
issues of American Indian interactions with the dominant European American
culture,
locates two opposing views: one that denies a Native American presence outright
and one that asserts its long history and ruthless destruction. The highly
reflective oral histories McMillin includes turn Buried Indians into
an accessible, readable portrait of a uniquely American culture clash and a
dramatic narrative grounded
in people’s genuine perceptions of what the platform mounds mean.
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