Faculty Research Fellow
Bonnie McElhinny grew up at the confluence of Connoquenessing and Glade Run Creeks in Pennsylvania, on Lenape and Seneca Territory. She has served as Principal of New College and as Director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her books include Words, Worlds and Material Girls; Filipinos in Canada (edited with Roland Coloma, Ethel Tungohan, J.P.Catungal and Lisa Davidson); and Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History (with Monica Heller). She directs Water Allies, which focuses on building good relations through anticolonial, feminist, and anti-racist approaches to water and environmental justice.
Fellowship Research Project: The River Runs a Long Way Straight Here: Down Bottom and Down Stream with the Connoquenessing Creek
This book is a biography of the Connoquenessing Creek, and an environmental history of the extraction of oil and coal and natural gas from underground our family farm and the Creek in Western Pennsylvania. The book’s form (riffle-pool), inspired by the Creek, considers how Seneca lands were paid to Revolutionary War veterans, the drilling of the world’s first oil wells, Irish-Slovakian family history, the flooding of the Seneca reserve, attempts to dilute pollution, and fracking. Freshwater mussels, old growth red oaks, hogsuckers, the night of the living dead gift shop, and some class III rapids all make an appearance.