Camilla Townsend, professor of history at Rutgers University, will come to the campus of DePauw University next week to deliver the Horizon Lecture. Dr. Townsend will discuss "Alias don Luis: The True Tales and Amazing Adventures of a 1560s Algonkian Who Traveled Three Continents" on Tuesday, March 5. The presentation will take place in Watson Forum, located within DePauw's Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media beginning at 7:30. The event is free and open to all.
"Paquiquineo 'don Luis' was an Algonkian-speaking Native American from the Chesapeake kidnapped by Spaniards in 1561," notes a description of the talk. "Although he spent the next decade with the Spanish, converted to Christianity, and won the love and respect of his captors, he eventually led a war party to kill a group of Jesuits attempting to establish a mission in his homeland. When we seek the records of his experiences abroad, his actions cease to seem mysterious."
Townsend's books include Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley; Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico and Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. The professor's significant awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2004), Franklin Grant, American Philosophical Society (2004) and a Fulbright Commission grant (1993).
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