Spring 2023
First Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative Retreat Jan 30
Interacting with Wabanaki-Maine History with
Wabanaki Reach Friday February 24, 2023 2-4 pm Virtual or Virtual/Community Event (Location TBA) Wabanaki Reach’s workshop, Interacting with Wabanaki-Maine History, is coming to campus virtually on Friday, February 24th from 2-4 pm. The program, led by five facilitators, is an interactive experience in which participants become engaged in a story of select events in the history of 400 years of colonization of Wabanaki people by Europeans in this territory now called the state of Maine. This experience of full participation increases the collective understanding of colonization and what it means for current descendants and future generations of the Wabanaki people. There is a 50-person enrollment cap; all participants are asked to have a blanket and a sign that says “RESISTOR” ready for the workshop.
Film and Discussion: Manzanar Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 6 pm Film and Dinner followed by 7 pm Panel Discussion with Ann Kaneko (filmmaker) and Kathy Jefferson Bancroft (tribal historic preservation officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Reservation) Parker Reed Room in Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center (SWACC) The Owens Valley Paiute have long called Owens Valley California, Payahuunadü, the place where the water always flows. Yet today this region is parched. Since the early 1900s, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has diverted water over 200 miles away, to be used by Angelenos. An inspired and poetic portrait of a place and its people, Manzanar Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust follows intergenerational women from three communities who defend their land, their history, and their culture from the insatiable thirst of Los Angeles. This documentary is both about histories of settler land theft and water extraction, and resilient community activism and environmental justice in Payahuunadü.
Environmental Studies Lecture: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 7pm
2022 MacArther fellow, Robin Wall Kimmerer, is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. As a writer and scientist she is interested not only in the restoration of ecological communities, but importantly, in the restoration of people’s relationships to land. Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
The Spring Session was co-facilitated by Assistant Professor Danae Jacobson from the History Department, Visiting Assistant Professor Ashton Wesner from the Science and Technology Studies Department, and Assistant Professor Laura Fugikawa from the WGSS and American Studies Department. In close partnership with Oak Institute Annual Theme 22-23 Indigenous Rights.
