Company and founder
A family name. A standard of answerability.
Lone Fight Systems LLC is an Indigenous-owned, independent Pennsylvania limited liability company based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Darren Lone Fight founded the company to translate research into systems that can carry obligation without flattening the relations that give it meaning.
Founder
Darren Lone Fight
Darren Lone Fight is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.
He is a professor of American Studies at Dickinson College and the founding director of what is now the Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples.
His work spans contemporary Indigenous art practices and philosophy, Indigenous futurism, archival ontology, interface theory, public humanities and institution-building, Indigenous data and provenance, and the translation of research into working systems.
Why repatriation
Repatriation is where that work stops being abstract. My relatives are buried in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School cemetery, five minutes from my office. I have encountered repatriation from both sides of the institutional boundary: helping an institution think through what it holds and what it owes, working alongside Tribal Nations bringing relatives home, and writing to museums as a descendant seeking their return. I know what the paperwork looks like from each chair. PAVA began with what I kept wishing existed.
The name / the standard
This company carries a family name, on purpose. In 2005, my grandfather Edward Lone Fight, a former Chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, told the Army Corps of Engineers that our people are connected to our lands mentally, spiritually, psychologically, culturally, traditionally, and historically. Lone Fight Systems begins from that relation. Everything we build is downstream of the obligation it names. The name is the standard we answer to.
Independence
Lone Fight Systems LLC is independent of and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Dickinson College.
Company conversations