This fall the American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) Speaker Series will feature the following scholars every other Friday, 11:15 am- 1:10 pm, 400 Caldwell Hall. These lectures are part of a bi-weekly graduate seminar (required for graduate students getting a minor in AIIS). They are open to the public to attend.
SEP 15: Beth Piatote
Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Visions of Indigenous Law in Louise Edrich's La Rose
This novel, LaRose, is the second in a trilogy that plays out across a broad swath of time and cuts through a central locus of space—the Ojibwe homelands that become the reservation and the township of Pluto, North Dakota. Each of the novels opens with a devastating act of violence, and follows various legal (and extra-legal) forms of justice. As they unfold, the novels show the failures of law, whether indigenous or settler-colonial, to provide satisfaction, or what we may consider “justice” in the face of loss. Given the failures of “justice,” the question arises whether the “pursuit of justice” is a reasonable purpose of law at all.
About the Speaker: Beth Piatote is an associate professor of Native American Studies and affiliated faculty in American Studies and the department of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include Native American literature, history, and law; Nez Perce language and literature; indigenous language revitalization; and creative writing. She earned her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. Read More
SEP 29: Jane Mt. Pleasant and Kevin Connelly
Associate Professor, Cornell University
Haudenosaunee Food Sovereignty: Exploring Indigenous
Conceptual Space Using Agriculture and Linguistics
Every human community grapples with how to feed itself. Currently, Indigenous peoples are struggling to realign their food systems with cultural values, to assert control over food from ground to table. Often referred to as food sovereignty, it is fundamental to the revitalization of indigenous communities as viable political, social, cultural, and economic entities. In this seminar Mt.Pleasant, an agronomist, and Connelly, a linguist and soil scientist, analyze Words that Come Before all Else (The Address of Thanksgiving), a Haudenosaunee speech that defines human relationships within the rest of creation. In our analysis we identify an indigenous conceptual space. We claim that Haudenosaunee food sovereignty springs from this very space.
OCT 27: Tiara R. Na'Puti
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
Strategies of Resistance in the Marianas: Militarization, Dispossession, & the Environment
NOV 10: Fikile Nxumalo
Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Austin
Decolonizing Place-Based Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education
Beginning with the premise that there is an urgent need for early childhood education to find new ways of critically and generatively encountering, engaging with, and pedagogically responding to the entanglements of anthropogenically damaged places and settler colonial legacies, this presentation engages with the significance of decolonial orientations to place-based environmental pedagogies in early childhood settings. Drawing from a multi-year participatory action research project with educators and children in suburban settings on unceded Coast Salish territories in British Columbia, Canada, the presentation brings attention to Indigenous presences and land relations as necessary, yet often ignored aspects of environmental education in settler colonial contexts. Using an approach referred to as refiguring presences – that is refiguring as re-animating, re-thinking, and relating to the Indigenous presences so often erased in settler colonial curriculum, the presentation examines the possibilities of refiguring presences in everyday encounters for generating a politicized (re)storying of settler colonial places with young children.
NOV 17: Bradley Pecore
Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of History of Art and Visual Studies, AIISP, Cornell University
“The World Ends: Ethnographic Knowledge and Early Colonial Governance in the Western Hemisphere, 1410-1535”
Bradley Pecore is a visual historian examining Native American and Indigenous aesthetics. He specializes in the History of Native American Art, American Art, Museum and Curatorial Studies. Read More
Dec 1: Ula Piasta-Mansfield
Ph.D., American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, Cornell University
The Perfect Crime: How Europeans Stole Indigenous Land and Forgot about it
In the fields of Indigenous as well as Colonial/Settler Colonial Studies, the Doctrine of Discovery has received a considerable attention as the origin story for a settler state such as the United States. However, I would argue that the Doctrine, while useful in capturing the tenor and the overall fabric of European colonization, does not adequately explain the various facets of this story, especially the story of the land. Preemption, i.e. the exclusive right of first purchase of Indigenous lands, is one those blind spots: the most understudied instrument in the formation of the settler colonial state. The goal of this paper is not so much to define or situate preemption historically as it is to critically evaluate the processes it launched and the precedence it set for the Indigenous-Euro-American relations in solidifying the Western property discourse on this continent.
About the Speaker: Urszula Piasta-Mansfield, Ph.D. is an allied scholar in Indigenous Studies, interested in the discourses of dispossession and settler colonialism through a lens of the preemption rights doctrine. Most recently, she has been researching the relationships between dispossession of Indigenous peoples, public lands and land grant institutions, as well as the history of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. Her work also includes co-curated exhibitions: Ah-Theuh-Neyh-Hah (The Planting Moon) and The Sustainers, 2016-2017 at Cornell Botanic Gardens; Ogwe:owe Consciousness as Peace, 2014 at Cornell Plantations; book chapter, “Seneca Resistance: Surviving the Kinzua Dam,” 2012. She works as a Lecturer/Extension Associate in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Read More
This seminar is led by Dr. Troy Richardson, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor, American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS). For a full course description please visit our Online Course Roster