The 2025 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography on Indigenous Ecologies of the Page: Bibliography, Birchbark, and Remediation will be given by Kelly Wisecup, Associate Professor of English, Northwestern University.

Before contemporary scholarly discussions about the role of the nonhuman entities—from animals to plants to rags to trees—that constitute pages, Indigenous people made birchbark books and containers that forged and indexed relationships among books and trees. This lecture is a history of Indigenous peoples’ birchbark bookmaking that asks why this practice increased at a moment when Indigenous homelands in the Great Lakes were being deforested. Wisecup also experiments with what a bibliography of birchbark pages might entail, to ask how scholars might adjust bibliographic methods to account for Indigenous peoples’ theorizations of tree temporalities, both ephemeral and enduring.