Join NAISI for our Monthly Beading Circle! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (2/4, 3/4, 4/1, & 5/6)

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for March Movie Nights!

Join us on March 12 as we screen the Lakota dub of Marvel’s The Avengers. 

Join the CNAIS Department Undergraduate Group (DUG) for a Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) concentration info session! This info session will provide an overview of concentration requirements and opportunities to ask questions about how CNAIS complements other concentrations. Pizza provided!

Nature is not peripheral to the economy — it is its foundation. Yet financial systems have long treated it as invisible or free, creating growing risks for companies, investors, and entire markets.

As biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and ecosystem degradation accelerate, nature-related risks are financially material. From supply chain disruption to regulatory change, the impacts are reshaping how capital must be allocated and how risk must be measured.

Banking on Nature brings together leaders from finance, science, and Indigenous communities to explore how markets are responding — and how financial systems can evolve to align with ecological limits and long-term resilience.

Join us for forward-looking conversations at the intersection of economics, ecology, and equity, and examine what it means to truly account for nature in financial decision-making.

Community members are welcome to join to all or part of the day. Please register to attend below.

Visiting as Academic Practice: A Conversation with Tara Wells

Hosted by Ashley Lance, Research Associate in Critical Classical Studies

“Practicing visitation in a good way can be overshadowed, overburdened by the habits of touring, of settlement, of occupation. Visitation is the way that we come together to comment on our togetherness, to attend to the changes afforded by time and our own agency. When I practice visitation, I am not visiting you. I am visiting our children’s future homelands.I am their guest, not yours.”

Tuck (2017).

‘Visiting’ is an integral part to many Indigenous cosmologies, relationships, and kinships. Beyond the importance of the practice to these relationships, visiting is an inherently queer and anti-capitalist practice: it requires showing up, listening, and making space for histories and futures of the land beyond a settler understanding. In this session, the practice of visiting is applied to academic spaces and relationships. What does visiting in academia look like? What can or should it accomplish? How do our disciplines shape how we visit? I answer these questions in tandem with Tara Wells, PhD Candidate at Duke University, who, along with myself, served as a co-editor of Res Difficiles’ special edition on Indigeneity and Classics. The journal issue is a first of its kind for Classics, not just in theme and topic, but also includes contributors who all identify as Indigenous. Through a discussion of our own research and reflections on the process of putting together the journal, we comment on how visiting can make space for new approaches to academic work.

Please read the following prior to the seminar: Eve Tuck, Haliehana Stepetin, Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing & Jo Billows (2023) Visiting as an Indigenous feminist practice, Gender and Education, 35:2, 144-155.

The seminar will take place in a hybrid format. Members of the Brown community are invited to join in person at the Department of Classics in the Macfarlane Seminar Room at 5 pm. To register on Zoom please register here. 

Tara Wells (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Duke’s Classical Studies program. Tara received an MA from the University of Maryland - College Park (2020) and a BA from Oberlin College (2018), both in Latin & Greek. Tara is an ancient historian interested in the representations of intersectional marginalized identities with a focus on race/ethnicity, gender, and social/legal status (enslaved, elite, etc.), across the ancient Mediterranean (ca. 5th c. BCE – 2nd c. CE). Her work combines literary, material, and visual evidence to understand social, cultural, and historical information surrounding identity in the ancient world. For her dissertation, Tara is exploring depictions of migrant women, many enslaved, in 5th-3rd c. BCE Greece through media of Greek tragedy, funerary stelae, and sculpture. Tara aims to illuminate the ways in which the women’s multiple marginalized identities may have complicated their experiences, which Tara uses to challenge traditional binary approaches to identity. As a multi-racial disabled woman, she is also passionate about making the study of Classics and academia at large more accessible and inclusive of traditionally underrepresented identities in the field. Overall, Tara hopes to amplify the voices of perspectives long ignored in the field, both who is included in our scholarship as well as who the scholars are.

Ashley Lance (she/her) is a Research Associate in Critical Classical Studies at Brown. Her research tracks the use of classical ideas in the development and justification of Residential and Boarding Schools in the US. Ashley is a Yurok and Wiyot Descendant and a tribal member of the Blue Lake Rancheria.

Join NAISI for Monthly Beading Circle! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (2/4, 3/4, 4/1, & 5/6)

Join us for the Student Community-Engaged Learning Showcase, an afternoon highlighting student work, community partnership and dialogue across issue areas shaping Rhode Island and beyond.

From 12–4 p.m. in the Kasper Multipurpose Room, explore student digital posters, connect with community partners and campus colleagues, and enjoy light food and networking in an open, drop-in format.

Beginning at 12:20 p.m. and running through 4 p.m., thematic panel conversations will take place across the street in Page-Robinson Hall, featuring students showcasing their community-engaged projects. 

Panel Themes

• Community Health and Wellness
• Art, Identity and Cultural Memory
• Climate Resilience
• Engaging Indigenous Communities
• Community Organizing
• Education Justice

Whether you stay for the full afternoon or drop in between commitments, the showcase offers a chance to see community-engaged learning in action, to meet collaborators and to explore ideas that drive meaningful change.

How does the global shift to “green” energy reshape land, labor, and political power? In this talk, political scientist Thea Riofrancos examines the political ecology of the energy transition, drawing on extensive fieldwork and research across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Her work reveals how lithium—heralded as a cornerstone of decarbonization—reorganizes territories and livelihoods while raising urgent questions about consent, sovereignty, and environmental justice.

Through case studies from the lithium triangle to U.S. supply chains, Riofrancos traces the tensions embedded in “green” industrial projects and the democratic stakes of rapid mineral extraction. She will explore the competing demands of climate policy, resource governance, and community rights, offering a deeper look at how the energy transition is reshaping politics at every scale.

3:00–4:00 p.m. seminar at Andrews House (13 Brown St), Room 110
4:00–5:00 p.m. reception at Andrews House lobby

This event is part of the Brown Seminar Series on Environment and Society. The seminar will be livestreamed for those unable to join in person (link coming soon).

Students and postdocs are also invited to a morning Q&A with Riofrancos to discuss careers in academia, public scholarship, political ecology, and navigating research across global contexts.

About the speaker:

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research spans resource extraction, climate politics, green technologies, social movements, and the global lithium sector. She is the author of Resource Radicals (Duke University Press, 2020), coauthor of A Planet to Win (Verso, 2019), and author of the forthcoming Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, Dissent, Jacobin, and NACLA. Riofrancos received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from Reed College.

All students and postdocs are invited to attend a Q&A session with Thea Riofrancos, Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. This morning gathering will provide an excellent opportunity to engage with Professor Riofrancos, who will discuss careers in academia, public scholarship, political ecology, and navigating research across global contexts.

This session will precede Professor Riofrancos’ afternoon talk, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

Registration encouraged.

Colonial Contradictions:
An Archaeological Microhistory of Forced Resettlement and Its Legacy in the Andes

In the 1570s CE, the peoples of the Andes were subjected to one of the largest forced resettlement projects ever undertaken by a colonial power—the Reducción General de Indios, or General Resettlement of Indians. The premises of the Reducción were contradictory: the agro-pastoral capacities of Andean communities at the foundation of the extractive colonial economy were to be somehow preserved despite mass dislocation and comprehensive demographic reordering across the Andean countryside. This talk traces out the political and ecological entanglements that resulted through an archaeological microhistory of a particular reducción in the Colca Valley of southern Peru.

Steven Wernke is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, director of the Spatial Analysis Research Laboratory, and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Spatial Research. Prof. Wernke is an archaeologist and historical anthropologist of the Andean region of South America. His research takes place at the intersection of several disciplines: archaeology and history, prehispanic and colonial studies, anthropology and cultural geography. Prof. Wernke’s interests center on the lived experiences of indigenous communities across the Spanish invasion of the Andes–especially how new kinds of communities, landscapes, and religious practice emerged out of successive attempts by the Inkas and the Spanish to subordinate and remake Andean societies in their own self-image. Methodologically, his work brings together analyses of archaeological and documentary datasets in geospatial frameworks.

Please join the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship this fall for the Digital Humanities (DH) Salons! The DH Salon series, hosted by the Center for Digital Scholarship, is a regular, informal presentation series bringing together digital humanities work across the Brown campus. Join us either in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (Room 137) on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library (with lunch!) or on Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/93718194177).

February 12: “Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas” with Linford Fisher, Associate Professor of History and the Center for Digital Scholarship team 

In May 2025, the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project went live during a day-long symposium at Brown. Nearly a decade in development through collaborations between PI Linford Fisher, CDS staff, and regional tribal nations, this layered project required a number of technical adjustments and innovations to collect and present the archival information and related materials in a way that would be sensitive to and legible for descendent communities and the wider public. This presentation will involve multiple members of the team sharing brief insights into some of the various aspects of the project.

The Data Matters Seminar Series is hosted by the Data Science Institute, covering why data matters across the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences. Data Matters is intended to stimulate conversations and collaboration by bringing multiple perspectives to challenging data-driven problems.

Light refreshments will be provided. 

South American Archaeology, at Scale?: Using Vision Foundation Models to Map Sites en masse in GeoPACHA-AI

Abstract: Archaeologists excel at documenting the material dimensions of social life at local and regional scales but we often struggle to generate national and continental-sale datasets with continuous, systematic coverage. Collecting such data is important for at least three reasons: 1) macro-regional datasets provide context for understanding the variation that we observe at local and regional scales; 2) synthetic databases stitched together out of regional projects often amplify sampling biases; and 3) past peoples themselves frequently understood and acted in their worlds through large scale networks, including empires, circuits of interregional trade, and long-distance seasonal migration. In this presentation, I discuss the development and deployment of one solution to this problem: GeoPACHA-AI (Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History, and Archaeology), an international collaborative project that develops and harnesses Vision Transformer-based AI models to conduct continental-scale archaeological imagery survey. GeoPACHA’s project area covers nearly the entirety of the central Andes, from northern Ecuador through southern Chile, and we seek to enable new perspectives on interregional social networks, the broad impacts of imperial expansions, and long-term responses to climate change.

Parker VanValkenburgh’s research and publications employ archaeological methods to address anthropological research questions, with a particular focus on the long-term impacts of colonialism and imperialism on Indigenous people and environments in the Peruvian Andes. Through the study of diverse materials and media––including architecture, ceramics, environmental datasets, and archival documents––he seeks to understand how relationships between people, institutions, and environments are transformed in the course of imperial histories, as well as how the strategies of survival and resilience that communities develop to deal with empires are passed down and reworked across generations. In the course of doing so, he strives to generate approaches that are widely applicable to the study of empire(s) beyond the Andean region and which contribute to interdisciplinary understanding of imperial legacies in the modern world. In this work, he draws amply on digital methodologies, including the tools of geographic information systems (GIS), to map and analyze social, political, and environmental change in space and time. He also applies a critical lens to the study of digital media and methodologies, asking not just how these techniques facilitate archaeological scholarship, but how digital mediation transforms the ways we work with collaborators, research subjects, students, and public audiences.

__

This seminar and discussion will be mediated by Karianne Bergen (DSI, DEEPS)

Part of Anthropology’s Spring 2026 Colloquium Series

This event is open to all Brown faculty, staff, and students who have an active Brown ID.

The Indigenous food sovereignty movement advocates for the reclamation of ancestral foods in Native communities like the Navajo Nation. What can archaeological research offer these discussions? This talk shares the results of a recent project that analyzed ceramic sherds from a ~300+ year old Diné (Navajo) habitation site in the Dinétah region of NW New Mexico. The results of this work provide evidence for a variety of early Navajo food preparation techniques c. 1750 CE, which are both similar to and different from what is done today in Diné communities. How then can we link this historical look at Diné diet with the ongoing food sovereignty movement in Indigenous communities?

Speaker Bio: Wade Campbell is a historical archaeologist and current Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Boston University. A member of the Navajo Nation, Wade’s research explores the historical relationships between Diné communities and other local groups in the US Southwest, including the Pueblos, Spanish, and Americans. In particular, Campbell’s work examines longer-term patterns of Diné settlement and economic activity across the greater Four Corners region, with a particular focus on the origins of the Diné sheepherding tradition and related shifts in land use, social organization, and diet and subsistence practices between AD 1600 and the present day.

Join NAISI for our Monthly Beading Circle! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (2/4, 3/4, 4/1, & 5/6)

Beading Circle is open to all Brown faculty, staff, and students who have an active Brown ID. 

The BCSC Native Heritage Series is planning our Annual Frybread Social!

Come join us and the Native community at Brown to celebrate the end of the semester. We encourage anyone who wants to learn about and enjoy the food to join and do so in community!

When: Friday, December 5th, 4 - 7 PM
Where: BCSC Formal Lounge (68 Brown St, Providence, RI 02912)
Who: This event is to celebrate Native American and Indigenous culture, but all are welcome. Space is limited, RSVP is required!

Join us on Thursday, December 4th at 3:30pm for our next storytime event, with Grandmother Moon by Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason (Schaghticoke/HoChunk), Assistant Director of Native American & Indigenous Studies at Brown University. 

Lamb-Cason will discuss the importance of oral tradition in Indigenous communities and her process of bringing these stories into written form. Along with a reading of Grandmother Moon and examples of traditional stories, there will also be a themed activity (to be announced.)

Children ages 4-8 and their caregivers are welcome.

Policy: children must be accompanied by an adult. Please RSVP below.

About the book:
“Nohhum, doesn’t it look like the moon is following us?”

During her weekly car ride with her grandmother from the city to the reservation, a young Native girl ponders the moon that seems to follow them. Each week, she looks forward to listening to her grandmother’s warm, soothing voice as she sings and tells stories. Tonight, her grandmother teaches her about Grandmother Moon, her significance, and why we honor her.

In her debut picture book, Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason (Schaghticoke/HoChunk) captures a grandmother and grandchild’s relationship through their shared wonder and admiration. Along with rich illustrations, Grandmother Moon preserves Indigenous histories and teachings within a modern setting, reminding us that Grandmother Moon is always watching over us, and wherever we are, we are safe and loved.

About the author:
Wunneanatsu Lamb-Cason (Schaghticoke/HoChunk) is an award-winning educator, traditional storyteller, author, and advocate whose work centers on truth-telling, representation, and equity in education. A former high school history teacher, she was named the 2024 National History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History—the first Indigenous educator to receive this honor. She now serves as the Assistant Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University.

Unwind at NAISI’s last Monthly Beading Circle of the fall semester! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (9/3, 10/1, 11/5, & 12/3)

See Photos from Fall 2025 Public Humanities Lunch Talks

Join the Simmons Center for a public humanities lunch talk with Thawn Sherenté Harris, the Simmons Center’s 2025 Reimagining New England Histories Artist in Residence.

Narragansett tribal member and cultural educator, Thawn Harris’ presentation explores how archival materials can inspire contemporary Native storytelling. Drawing from his time working with the Brown University Archives, Harris shares how historical documents and narratives inform his creative practice—shaping new stories, songs, and educational approaches that connect the past and present. A recipient of the Princess Redwing Arts and Culture Award through the Tomaquag Museum, Harris uses his art and teaching to celebrate the resilience and continuity of Narragansett traditions. This event invites audiences to see how learning from ancestral voices can spark modern forms of cultural expression and ensure that Indigenous heritage continues to thrive for future generations.

Lunch provided with registration.

About the Speaker

Thawn Sherenté Harris is a traditional storyteller, dancer, singer, and cultural educator who has devoted his life to preserving and sharing the cultural heritage of the Narragansett Tribal Nation—the Indigenous Peoples of present-day Rhode Island. As a father of seven and husband of 28 years, Thawn lives adjacent to his ancestral tribal lands, where he continues the lifeways and practices passed down through generations.

A graduate of the University of Rhode Island and current Physical Education Advisor at the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, Thawn has served as a cultural ambassador to Tanzania and has performed widely across New England for educational institutions, libraries, museums, and arts organizations.

His honors include World Champion Eastern War Dancer (2006), Motif Magazine’s Favorite Cultural Storyteller (2023), and Princess Red Wing Arts & Culture Award from the Tomaquag Museum (2025).

Thawn’s creative practice centers on traditional Narragansett storytelling, music (including cedar flute and hand drum), and dance, rooted in the oral traditions of his people.

Join us in welcoming Dr. Mack Scott III, Assistant Professor, Ruth J. Simmons Center, historian, and member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, as we celebrate and elevate Native voices and research in honor of Native American Heritage Month.  

Everyone is welcome! 

Unwind at NAISI’s Monthly Beading Circle! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (9/3, 10/1, 11/5, & 12/3)

You’re invited to join us for an in-depth conversation between Joseph Lee, Aquinnah Wampanoag journalist and author of Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity, and Bathsheba Demuth, Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society and Faculty Director of NAISI.

In this discussion, Lee delves into his memoir, which intertwines personal narrative with a critical examination of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and community resilience. Weaving together his own experiences and those of Indigenous communities around the world, Lee situates his own story within a broader, global context, exploring Indigenous struggles and triumphs from the icy tundra of Alaska to the forests of Northern California and the halls of the United Nations.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the Author:

Joseph Lee is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer based in New York City. He has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Mercy University. His writing has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Vox, High Country News, and more. He was a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and a Senior Indigenous Affairs Fellow at Grist.

This event is a Q+ A with Caitlin Mostoway Parker hosted by Ashley Lance, Research Associate in Critical Classical Studies. Caitlin will speak to us about her experiences in archeology and her role in investigating the impacts of residential schools on Indigenous and First Nations communities in Canada. This interview provides a space to showcase the potentials and limitations of applying the study of Classics outside traditional educational settings.The interview will be held online through Zoom on October 28th at 4 pm.

Caitlin Mostoway Parker is a Cree/Settler classicist and archaeologist who currently resides on Treaty 1 Territory, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She is a member of Nisichawayasihk (Nis-each-ah-why-ah-seek) Cree Nation, located on Treaty 5 Territory in Northern Manitoba. She holds a BAH in Classics from the University of Winnipeg, and an MPhil in Classics from Trinity College Dublin. Caitlin will be beginning her PhD at UCL in January, researching the use of Classics within the framework of the Hudson’s Bay Company as a tool of colonization in North America.

This talk probes the architectural, aesthetic, and scientific project of the Smithsonian Institute’s formation, one rooted in a developmental narrative of progress and entrenching racial hierarchies meant to temper a fractious mid-nineteenth century polity inching toward disunion. It considers how the institution’s monumental architecture was informed by ethnographic ideas of race, culture, and soil, in particular Anglo Saxon origins of Gothic and Romanesque styles. The construction of the new research institute and museum relied upon local enslaved labor thus revealing the tensions between freedom and unfreedom foundational to U.S. civic spaces since the founding of the nation. The lecture also considers how the Smithsonian’s public initiatives – early efforts at establishing the modern discipline of archaeology and cultivating public tastes in art – attempted to shape a national historical narrative that provided evidence that Native American nations were a “civilization” in decline. This, in turn, justified the continued dispossession of indigenous lands by the State and settlement of their territories by U.S. citizens.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

About the speaker:

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she recently served as director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of Global Africa Lab. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). With her practice Studio&, she is a member of the architectural design team that recently completed the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project educating the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). She is currently developing the manuscript for her next book Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and U.S. Civic Architecture.

Join NAISI for our fall Lunch & Learn, featuring Sociology Phd Student Billie Sams!

Billie’s research examines the intersections of settler colonialism, sovereignty, and identity among American Indian and Alaska Native communities. Through oral histories and archival work, she demonstrates how sovereignty functions not only as a political status but also as a tool of community agency— enabling cultural reclamation and ensuring the continuity of Indigenous identity across generations.

About Billie:

Billie Sams (she/her) is a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. She received her B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego.

Join us for a talk featuring NAISI Director of Undergraduate Studies, Mack Scott III!

“Sachemship: Statesmanship and Futurity in the Dawnland”

Description: In 1931, the Narragansett elder and Councilman Rev. Daniel Seekater filed a land claim against the state of Rhode Island. Although this was nothing new—Narragansett leaders had been registering their complaints since the final remnants of their ancestral lands were illegally seized in 1880—Seekater’s claim was revealing because it exemplified a futurism that animates Indigenous axiology. You see, at the age of seventy-eight, Seekater held little hope that this case might result in his own material betterment or that of his kin because the Reverend had no direct descendants. Instead, as one newspaper recorded, it was “only with the thought of justice for the remaining 118 Narragansett that he [Seekater] plans to ask for redress.”

This research talk examines various instances in which Narragansett leaders sought political, economic, social, and diplomatic means to ensure the continuance of their community.

Bio:

Mack Scott is a historian, educator, and member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. His work focuses on the intersections of race and identity and employs agency as a lens through which to view and understand the voices, stories, and perspectives of traditionally marginalized peoples. He has published works illuminating the experiences of African American, Native American, and Latinx peoples. He is currently working on a project that traces the Narragansett nation from the pre-colonial to the modern era.

Virgil Ortiz

Virgil Ortiz (born 1969) is a Pueblo artist, known for his pottery and fashion design from Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico. Although Ortiz has projects in varying mediums, Ortiz is first and foremost a potter. Ortiz says, “Clay is the core of all my creations. My work centers on preserving traditional Cochiti culture and art forms. It’s important to recognize that Pueblo communities are very much alive and have a level of vitality that speaks to generations of strength, persistence, brilliance, and thriving energy.” Ortiz makes a variety of pottery, including traditional Cochiti figurative pottery, experimental figurative pottery, traditional pottery vessels.

Pueblo Revolt 1680/2180

In this artist’s talk, Ortiz keeps Cochiti pottery traditions alive but transforms them into a contemporary vision that embraces his Pueblo history and culture and merges it with apocalyptic themes, science fiction, and his own storytelling. Historic events like the 1680 Pueblo Revolt may not immediately spring to mind when you think of science fiction, but blending the two have occupied Ortiz for nearly two decades. The storyline transports the viewer back more than three hundred years to the historical events of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and then hurtles forward through time to the year of 2180, introducing a cast of characters along the way. As Ortiz’s saga unfolds, history mingles with the future in a bold new chapter of resistance and revolution in his art and installations. Inspired by the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the most successful uprising in history, Ortiz reimagines the rebellion through a futuristic lens where tradition and innovation collide.

Free and open to the public. In-person event.

Clay Revolution at RISD

This talk is the second of two joint events organized with RISD’s Ceramics Department. The first event is a public lecture the day prior (Oct. 15) at RISD Museum, 2 to 3 p.m.

Join us at the closing of Sound/Performance/Curation as Care: A Convening with a performance by Laura Ortman!

A member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, Laura Ortman is a musician and composer who creates across multiple platforms, including albums, live performance, field recordings, and video works. As a soloist, Ortman performs on amplified and Apache violin, vocals, piano, electric guitar, and keyboard. In 2008, Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Indigenous orchestral ensemble. She has also collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Okkyung Lee, and Jeffrey Gibson. She has performed and presented work nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2021); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, Canada (2017, 2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Canada (2017); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2009). Ortman is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship (2022); a Jerome Foundation, Jerome at Camargo Residency (2020); the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, National Artist Fellowship (2016); and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2014).

Sound/Performance/Curation as Care is planned as a 1.5-day convening at Brown University in October 2025, to coincide with The Bell’s presentation of ojo|-|ólǫ́, the first major institutional solo presentation of work by Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico]). Learn more about the exhibition here.

Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) and Brown University Fellowships staff for a CNAIS + Fellowships Info Session!

What you’ll learn:

• Overview of Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) concentration requirements
• How CNAIS complements other concentrations
• Fellowships available to CNAIS concentrators, with particular focus on the Udall Fellowship

Hear from:

• Professor Mack Scott, NAISI Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS)
• Ashley Gale, Assistant Director of Fellowships and Post-Graduate Opportunities
• Joel Simundich, The Anne Crosby Emery Associate Dean of the College for Fellowships

Students: learn more about grant funding for your research!

This is an info session for undergrad and grad students to learn more about this year’s Pembroke Center student research grants and how to apply. Pizza and soft drinks provided.

For more information, contact Helis Sikk (helis_sikk@brown.edu) or Wendy Lee (wendy_lee@brown.edu). Applications for the 2025-26 academic year will be due on Monday, October 13, 2025. Applications open to current Brown students conducting research related to women, gender, and/or sexuality.

Unwind at NAISI’s Monthly Beading Circle! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (9/3, 10/1, 11/5, & 12/3)

Come learn more about our approved study abroad options in Australia (Melbourne, Sydney, Tropical North Queensland) and New Zealand (Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin)!

Check out the links to the left under “Related Content” to explore program websites.

Join us for an opening celebration for ERIC-PAUL RIEGE: ojo|-|ólǫ́! This celebration will include a durational performance by artist Eric-Paul Riege in the Bell, accompanied by a reception. Free and open to the public!

About the Exhibition

ojo|-|ólǫ́ is a major solo exhibition by Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico]) featuring an immersive installation of textiles, sculptures, collages, and video activated with moments of live performance. Customary Diné practices of weaving, silversmithing, and beading are the foundation of Riege’s monumental soft sculptures and other mixed-media works that reference Diné mythology, recall the history of settler trading posts inside and adjacent to the Navajo Nation, and question the notion of “authenticity” as a value marker of Indigenous art and craft. His artworks, made from natural and synthetic materials sourced from traditional and hyperreal sources, invite viewers’ touch and play while initiating challenging conversations about Native sovereignty, the global art market, and the role of educational institutions in both disseminating and dispossessing knowledge about Indigenous art and cultures.

Developed in partnership betweenThe Bell / Brown Arts Institute and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, ojo|-|ólǫ́ brings together Riege’s work across media in his largest solo presentation to date. To create the new pieces featured in the exhibition, Riege conducted material research with the Navajo collections held by Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology in 2023 and the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in 2024. The resulting body of work—from large-scale jewelry and tools to weavings made from unexpected materials—disidentifies with the colonial hoarding practices of institutional archives yet still celebrates the ancestral traditions of labor contained within Indigenous-made objects.

Extending Riege’s collage-based practice and iterative approach to artmaking, ojo|-|ólǫ́ includes Navajo objects held by the Haffenreffer Museum shown in conversation with jewelry, sketches, regalia, and assorted ephemera from the artist’s personal collection. In the synthesized archive room, the boundaries between private and public, past and present, real and fake are blurred, animating the ways that Indigenous identities and knowledges are in dynamic, constant flux.

For Riege, durational performance is a necessary mode of learning from and with materials and objects. At different moments during the run of the exhibition, Riege will activate the space with “weaving dances” that wake up objects through sound and movement. The September 18 opening celebration will be the artist’s first performance with Hólǫ́, his collaborator and the exhibition’s namesake. On October 9-10, a two-day convening will generate caring yet critical interrogations of the ways Indigeneity is represented in museum and university settings. These events are free and all may be present as co-witnesses.

Ultimately, ojo|-|ólǫ́ invites a collective reflection into the practices of university museums and other institutions that have accumulated Indigenous art and ancestors, and simultaneously forwards a call for Indigenous cultural resurgence in the present and towards the future.

Credits

Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́ is curated by Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD, Associate Curator at the The Bell / Brown Arts Institute and Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery. The exhibition is co-presented by The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University, and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, with support from the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown and the UW Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The exhibition will be on view at The Bell from September 3 - December 7, 2025 and will travel with a new iteration opening at the Henry Art Gallery from March - August 2026.

The project is made possible at Brown by the generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Terra Foundation for American Art, Becky Gochman P’27, and David Gochman ’87 P’27.

This panel featured a conversation with Navajo scholar Melanie Yazzie and visual artist Will Wilson, moderated by Brown University professor Macarena Gómez-Barris. This event kicked off the second year of programming of the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB), and a reception followed the conversation.

Panel Talks

Melanie Yazzie, “Our Prayers Lose Their Meanings When the Land Becomes Industry”: Resource Nationalism and (De)colonization in the Navajo Nation

In this talk, I explored resource nationalism, resource colonization, and water rights within the Navajo Nation. I highlighted how the Navajo Nation exemplifies resource nationalism, which makes it a key player in determining national policies for all tribal nations on energy. I also focused on Diné grassroots activists who have consistently challenged the tribal government’s resource nationalism, arguing that resource-based development is simply a continuation of colonial exploitation, or what they call resource colonization. I concluded the talk by considering the impact of resource colonization on the Navajo Nation’s water rights, and drew important lessons about decolonization from Diné grassroots movements, which provide a foundation for alternative modes of relationship-based development that center Diné philosophical values, respect for the land, and sustainability.

Will Wilson, “Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition”

What can a critical Indigenous cartography reveal about uranium extraction and processing on the Navajo Nation? How does the narration of place through an Indigenous lens offer an alternative vision of who we are as people? The Connecting the Dots Project, initiated in 2019, seeks to answer these questions and more as it links geography and history with the cultural imaginary of a community through visual narration. This photographic survey counters and reconciles traumatic histories of extraction with contemporary Indigeneity and our complex relationship with Dinétah. These are not photographs of wastelands or sacrifice zones; they are images of home, a landscape of memories that make us who we are. Diné Bikeyah is a land aware of its people. It knows where our umbilical cords, binding us to the land, are buried and where our loved ones have passed. This land has sustained Diné families for generations and continues to provide for and protect us now and into the future. My life and work are woven into Connecting the Dots, perhaps most importantly, through my belief that photography is a generative practice that can shift paradigms.

About the Speakers

Melanie Yazzie (Diné) is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Macalester College. She specializes in Indigenous feminist and queer studies, American Indian history, Diné studies, social and political theory, political ecology and environmental studies, social movements, carcerality, urban Native studies, and media and pop culture. She is coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021) and The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save the Earth (Common Notions Press, 2021). She co-hosts and produces the podcast “Red Power Hour,” which is sponsored by Red Media, a Native-led media organization she cofounded. She also does community organizing with the Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization she cofounded in 2014 that is committed to Indigenous liberation and decolonization.

Will Wilson (Diné) is a photographer and trans-customary artist who spent his formative years living on the Navajo Nation. His art projects center around the continuation and transformation of customary Indigenous cultural practice. He studied photography, sculpture, and art history at the University of New Mexico (MFA, Photography, 2002) and Oberlin College (B.A., Studio Art and Art History, 1993). He won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum in 2007, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Sculpture in 2010, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for Photography in 2016, and in 2020, he was the Doran Artist in Residence at the Yale University Art Gallery. In 2017, he received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has held visiting professorships at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Oberlin College, and the University of Arizona. Currently, he heads the photography program at Santa Fe Community College.

Join us for the opening reception of The sun has its own drum on September 11 from 5:30-7:00pm!

About the Exhibition

The sun has its own drum presents work by Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Duane Slick (Meskwaki Nation of Iowa, Ho Chunk Nation of Nebraska), and Robert Peters (Mashpee Wampanoag), four Northeast-based artists who explore the proliferation of Indigenous worldviews and values through sound. Many Indigenous epistemologies are rooted in ideas of kinship between human and more-than-human beings, seeking rhythmic alignment within the natural world. The work presented here considers the intangible power of sound to facilitate this intersubjective kinship, to make and reclaim space, and to challenge Western ocularcentrism. Though some work directly with sound as a medium, others translate sonic phenomena into unique visual languages.

The sun has its own drum is curated by Christina Young (MA ’26 Public Humanities), Exhibitions Fellow at The Bell Gallery/Brown Arts Institute, with Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD, The Bell/Brown Arts Institute’s Associate Curator. We acknowledge the input from students enrolled in the Spring 2025 Critical Curating course at RISD taught by Kathy Battista, PhD. 

On View August 19-December 14
Galery Hours: 9am - 9pm M-F | 12-5 Sat | 12-8 Sun

Join CASA Melbourne program manager, Eloise Lyndon, for a detailed information session. Learn what makes this program, university, and city a favorite for those looking to study abroad “down under”! 

Program Information

Australia’s best student city – a safe and vibrant metropolis offering world-class education, we are also located in a region which is rapidly becoming a hub for education, research and collaboration.

The University of Melbourne is a leading centre for higher education and research in the Asia-Pacific region. With strong research performance, excellence in teaching and learning and intellectual and social capital, the University is positioned with the world’s foremost institutions and currently ranked number 1 in Australia and number 31 in the world.

The University’s contribution to new knowledge and ideas has helped shape the City of Melbourne over the past 170 years. We are home to a vibrant medical precinct, a world-famous artistic community, a thriving start-up network, and urban and rural researchers whose cutting-edge work on sustainability will shape the future of our planet. Yet, we maintain a true sense of place, recognising the importance of the University’s relationship to the traditional owners of the land on which our six campuses stand.

The CASA Melbourne program provides undergraduate students a unique opportunity for immersion into Australian culture. The University is home to students from over 130 countries and diversity and inclusiveness are attributes that enrich our broad community. CASA students will be studying, learning from and living alongside students from all backgrounds and cultures.

The CASA-Melbourne academic program explores the theme of Australia’s Place. A sense of place is of integral importance to the University: Melbourne’s place locally and globally, its history and future, Melbourne’s links to its indigenous communities, its connections to the city and its place in the Asia-Pacific region. The program will provide students a unique opportunity to understand Australian contemporary culture, reflecting on historical legacies and traditions in a modern and global context.

CASA-Melbourne students will engage in a week of academic orientation exploring these connections that includes seminars, field trips and independent research. Students will also be offered a range of activities throughout the semester designed to build on Australia’s Place.

Unwind after the first day of classes at NAISI’s Monthly Beading Circle! Led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota), supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary! 

Beading Circle dates: First Wednesday of each month (9/3, 10/1, 11/5, & 12/3)

Join CASA Melbourne program manager, Eloise Lyndon, for a detailed information session. Learn what makes this program, university, and city a favorite for those looking to study abroad “down under”! 

Program Information

Australia’s best student city – a safe and vibrant metropolis offering world-class education, we are also located in a region which is rapidly becoming a hub for education, research and collaboration.

The University of Melbourne is a leading centre for higher education and research in the Asia-Pacific region. With strong research performance, excellence in teaching and learning and intellectual and social capital, the University is positioned with the world’s foremost institutions and currently ranked number 1 in Australia and number 31 in the world.

The University’s contribution to new knowledge and ideas has helped shape the City of Melbourne over the past 170 years. We are home to a vibrant medical precinct, a world-famous artistic community, a thriving start-up network, and urban and rural researchers whose cutting-edge work on sustainability will shape the future of our planet. Yet, we maintain a true sense of place, recognising the importance of the University’s relationship to the traditional owners of the land on which our six campuses stand.

The CASA Melbourne program provides undergraduate students a unique opportunity for immersion into Australian culture. The University is home to students from over 130 countries and diversity and inclusiveness are attributes that enrich our broad community. CASA students will be studying, learning from and living alongside students from all backgrounds and cultures.

The CASA-Melbourne academic program explores the theme of Australia’s Place. A sense of place is of integral importance to the University: Melbourne’s place locally and globally, its history and future, Melbourne’s links to its indigenous communities, its connections to the city and its place in the Asia-Pacific region. The program will provide students a unique opportunity to understand Australian contemporary culture, reflecting on historical legacies and traditions in a modern and global context.

CASA-Melbourne students will engage in a week of academic orientation exploring these connections that includes seminars, field trips and independent research. Students will also be offered a range of activities throughout the semester designed to build on Australia’s Place.

On campus this summer? Join NAISI on Wednesday, 8/6, for its monthly beading circle! Beading circle will be led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota). Supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Are you interested in studying abroad in Santiago, Chile? Don’t miss this CASA Chile information session, led by Pilo Mella, CASA Chile Resident Director.

The CASA Chile program provides students with the opportunity for full immersion in Chilean culture and the Spanish language. Students take a Pro-Seminar course as well as 3-4 local university courses with Chilean students, completed at one or more of three top local universities: Universidad de Chile (UCH), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), and Universidad Diego Portales (UDP). 

On campus this summer? Join NAISI on Wednesday, 7/2, for its monthly beading circle! Beading circle will be led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota). Supplies, tea, and snacks provided–no experience necessary!

Please join Native/Native American Brown Alumni (NABA) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for a community celebration in honor of degree recipients — celebrating their achievements, families and communities. Join alumni, faculty and staff in welcoming this year’s graduates into the alumni community and commemorate their dedication and endeavors. All Brown alumni and students are welcome to attend. Pre-registration is required.

Registration for Students

Registration for All Other Community Members

All alumni, students and families are welcome to celebrate the diversity of Brown’s student and alumni community with Brown’s alumni affinity groups: Asian/Asian American Alumni Alliance, Brown University Latino Alumni Council, Inman Page Black Alumni Council, Native/Native American Brown Alumni, the Brown Alumni Pride Association and the Disability and Neurodivergence Alumni Collective. Enjoy a presentation of gifts to representatives from the graduating Class of 2025. Raise a glass to Brown’s alumni leaders and graduates in recognition of their accomplishments.

Co‐sponsored by Brown Alumni Association, the LGBTQ Center, the Brown Center for Students of Color (formerly the Third World Center) and the Undocumented, First-Generation College and Low-Income (U-FLi) Student Center.

“Lost Sisters, Lost But Not Forgotten” by Dawn Spears

Program:

• 9:30–10:00 a.m. – Breakfast and Mingle
• 10:00–10:15 a.m. – Welcome and Opening Remarks
• 10:15–10:45 a.m. – Project Description and Demonstration
• 10:45–11:00 a.m. – Coffee Break
• 11:00–11:45 a.m. – Community Collaborations
• 12:00–12:45 p.m. – Lunch (Provided)
• 12:45–1:00 p.m. – Special Thanks and Recognition
• 1:00–1:45 p.m. – Rethinking History and Reframing the Narrative
• 1:45–2:00 p.m. – Snack Break
• 2:00–2:45 p.m. – Ethics, Technology, and Art in Building a Community-Driven Project
• 2:45–3:00 p.m. – Snack Break
• 3:00–3:45 p.m. – Keynote: Lisa Brooks (Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi), Professor of American Studies and English, Amherst College
• 4:00–4:15 p.m. – Closing Remarks
• 4:15–5:00 p.m. – Reception

Full program

“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” - Fanon

In her book Programme of Absolute Disorder, Francois Vèrges speaks directly to practitioners within the realms of arts and culture to call for visionary, imaginative thinking in order to imagine arts, culture, heritage, and cultural spaces outside of the dominant world order created by colonial legacy. Rooted in theory from the Black radical tradition, she advocates for institutions by and for those who have been historically erased and exploited to maintain the apparatus of white western world order.

This conference asks: is it possible to transform cultural and academic institutions from sites of colonial harm into spaces of justice, care, and community? Bringing together museum professionals, scholars, artists, and community leaders, we explore how museums, archives, and institutions alike are confronting their colonial legacies towards reparative futures.

Through critical conversations and activities, sessions will examine challenges and possibilities for repatriation, community-driven exhibitions, archival intervention, and reimagining history telling. Topics include decolonization efforts across indigenous communities and university campuses, alternative practices that challenge the colonial violence of the archive, the nuances of representing Japanese American wartime incarceration, the role of Black artistic production and curatorial methods as a catalyst for political action during global crisis, and the complexities of aesthetics from a Black feminist lens to explore the possibilities of creating equity in arts institutions.

Through these topical sessions, attendees will explore a variety of ways that decolonial theory can be practiced from grass roots activism to hegemonic disruption– moving beyond symbolic gestures towards transformative, community-centered change.

A virtual conference organized as part of the Simmons Center’s MA in Public Humanities course Decolonization of Museums: Nations, Museums, Anti Colonialism and the Contemporary Moment.

Learn More about the Conference Sessions, Speakers and Moderators here.

Join us Wednesday, 5/7, for our last monthly beading circle of the Spring semester! Beading circle will be led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota). Supplies, tea, and cookies provided–no experience necessary!

For the past 30 years, Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship has served as an innovative hub for research and teaching in digital humanities (DH) and scholarly communication across disciplines. Join staff, faculty, and student stakeholders for a two-day symposium celebrating the center’s work in digital projects, training and critical DH pedagogy, and born-digital publications. The program highlights Brown Library’s leadership in the field and looks to the future

The symposium will showcase the exciting work our center and our students have been doing as we look to the future of the field.

Hybrid event. Zoom link:  https://brown.zoom.us/j/92181369165

Registration required:

Register for Day Two BELOW.

Register here for Day One.

Program

Friday, May 2

• 8:30 a.m. – Arrivals, coffee
• 9 a.m. – Welcome from President Christina H. Paxson
• 9:15 to 10 a.m. – History of Digital Scholarship at Brown
  • John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts
  • Steve Lubar, George L. Littlefield Professor of American History, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Professor of American Studies
  • Moderator: Tara Nummedal, John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History, Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship
• 10 to 10:15 a.m. – Break
• 10:15 to 11:15 a.m. – Launching the Stolen Relations Project
  • Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship
  • Linford Fisher, Associate Professor of History
  • Lorén Spears, Executive Director of the Tomaquag Museum and enrolled Narragansett Tribal Nation citizen
  • Paula Peters, journalist, educator and activist. Member of the Wampanoag tribe
  • Moderator: Rae Gould (Nipmuc), Executive Director, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University
• 11:15 to 11:30 a.m. – Break
• 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. – Training and Critical DH Pedagogy with Students Past and Present
  • Cosette Bruhns Alonso, Assistant Editor, Brown University Digital Publications
  • Warren Harding, Assistant Professor of English, SUNY, Binghamton
  • Talya Housman, digital historian, museum educator, and library professional
  • Maggie Masselli, Graduate Student in History of Art and Architecture
  • Moderator: Nora Dimmock, Deputy University Librarian
• 12:30 p.m. – Lunch with a Viewing Party of the New Frameworks to Preserve Born-Computational Art Project
  • Cody Carvel, Digital Scholarship Technologist
  • Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship
  • Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services
  • Khanh Vo, Digital Humanities Specialist
  • Hilary Wang, Digital Archivist
• 2 to 3 p.m – Born-Digital Publications: New Scholarly Forms, New Models for Collaboration
  • Eric Brandt, Director, University of Virginia Press
  • Tara Nummedal, John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History, Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship
  • Donald J. Waters, Senior Scholar, Coalition for Networked Information and Vice President, Engineering Information Foundation
  • Nadine Zimmerli, Editor in Chief, University of Virginia Press
  • Moderator: Kevin McLaughlin, George Hazard Crooker University Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty
• 3 to 3:15 p.m. – Break
• 3:15 to 4:15 p.m. – Diversifying Digital Publishing: Cross-Organizational Support for Scholars & Librarians
  • Sara Jo Cohen, Editorial Director, University of Michigan Press
  • Marco Robinson, Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice, Prairie View A & M University
  • La Tanya Rogers, Interim Dean, School of Humanities & Behavioral Social Sciences, Fisk University
  • Charles Watkinson, Associate University Librarian for Publishing and Director, University of Michigan Press
  • Moderator: Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications
• 4:15 p.m. – Closing Remarks and Toast
  • Tara Nummedal, John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History, Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship
  • Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship

April 24, 2025 | Mystic Seaport Museum
Evening program featuring the exhibition Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea
April 25–26, 2025 | Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
Conversations around conservation: waterways, culture, and resilience

SEE PHOTOS FROM SEEQAN SESSIONS 2025

Seeqan Sessions seeks to honor the promise of this Spring season by bringing together knowledge-bearers, scholars, advocates, artists, teachers, and youth from across the Dawnlands plus interested members of the public for conversation, connection, and community. This gathering will revolve around water, watersheds, and the oceans with exhibit tours, panel presentations, artist reflections, and discussions.

The central topic for this convening will be conservation: waterways, culture, and resilience. Conservation involves the necessary pursuit of protection, preserving what we value for the next generations. It also can be a practice of exclusion, extraction, and division, reinforcing colonial constructs and systems of exploitative power. Together, we’ll explore the conservation of land and water, of history and art, of community and youth, and more through decolonizing methodologies.

Free and open to the public. Lunch and museum admission are included in your registration. This event is a co-organized convening with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

April 24, 2025 | Mystic Seaport Museum
Evening program featuring the exhibition Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea
April 25–26, 2025 | Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
Conversations around conservation: waterways, culture, and resilience

SEE PHOTOS FROM SEEQAN SESSIONS 2025

Seeqan Sessions seeks to honor the promise of this Spring season by bringing together knowledge-bearers, scholars, advocates, artists, teachers, and youth from across the Dawnlands plus interested members of the public for conversation, connection, and community. This gathering will revolve around water, watersheds, and the oceans with exhibit tours, panel presentations, artist reflections, and discussions.

The central topic for this convening will be conservation: waterways, culture, and resilience. Conservation involves the necessary pursuit of protection, preserving what we value for the next generations. It also can be a practice of exclusion, extraction, and division, reinforcing colonial constructs and systems of exploitative power. Together, we’ll explore the conservation of land and water, of history and art, of community and youth, and more through decolonizing methodologies.

Free and open to the public. Lunch and museum admission are included in your registration. This event is a co-organized convening with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

April 24, 2025 | Mystic Seaport Museum
Evening program featuring the exhibition Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea
April 25–26, 2025 | Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
Conversations around conservation: waterways, culture, and resilience

SEE PHOTOS FROM SEEQAN SESSIONS 2025

Seeqan Sessions seeks to honor the promise of this Spring season by bringing together knowledge-bearers, scholars, advocates, artists, teachers, and youth from across the Dawnlands plus interested members of the public for conversation, connection, and community. This gathering will revolve around water, watersheds, and the oceans with exhibit tours, panel presentations, artist reflections, and discussions.

The central topic for this convening will be conservation: waterways, culture, and resilience. Conservation involves the necessary pursuit of protection, preserving what we value for the next generations. It also can be a practice of exclusion, extraction, and division, reinforcing colonial constructs and systems of exploitative power. Together, we’ll explore the conservation of land and water, of history and art, of community and youth, and more through decolonizing methodologies.

Free and open to the public. Lunch and museum admission are included in your registration. This event is a co-organized convening with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

Note: Registration for this event will be capped at 80 attendees. Please complete the form below to ensure your spot.

On Earth Day, join the Global Environmental Justice Working Group and IBES for a powerful and wide-ranging conversation on global environmental justice. This symposium brings together distinguished scholars and activists working at the forefront of environmental justice movements around the world.

Through a moderated panel discussion followed by small group conversations with individual panelists, the symposium will explore how communities across diverse global contexts are responding to ecological degradation, defending land rights, and advancing Indigenous and environmental justice.

• Joan Martinez-Alier: Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Co-founder of the Environmental Justice Atlas and recipient of the 2020 Balzan Prize and 2023 Holberg Prize for his contributions to ecological economics and political ecology.
• Stha Yeni: Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Researcher and advocate with over 15 years of experience in land rights and agrarian transformation.
• Hendro Sangkoyo: Co-founder of the School of Democratic Economics, Indonesia. An educator and activist focused on grassroots environmental knowledge and democratic resource governance.
• Lucía Ixchiu: Mayan K’iche journalist, artist, and feminist from Guatemala. Co-founder of Festivales Solidarios, a collective that promotes Indigenous rights and environmental defense through cultural activism.

The event will include light refreshments and beverages (vegetarian and vegan options included). Attendees will have the opportunity to engage directly with speakers during post-panel informal discussions.

Event schedule

4–5:15 – Panel discussion and Q&A in Andrews 110
5:15–5:30 – Snack and hydration break in Andrews 106
5:30–6:30 – Small group discussions in break-out rooms with individual panelists

• Group 1 with Joan Martinez Alier in Andrews 110
• Group 2 with Stha Yeni in Andrews 106
• Group 3 with Hendro Sangkoyo in Andrews 006
• Group 4 with Lucía Ichiu in Andrews 310
  

Join us for Day 2 of the 3rd Annual NAISI Spring Research Symposium! This symposium provides an opportunity for Brown University undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs to share their NAIS-related research and projects that they’ve developed over the past year. Dinner provided!

Day 2 presentations include:

• Chase Bryer, PhD Candidate, Behaviorial and Social Sciences, Out of the Shadows: Two Spirit Survivance and Redefining Aging with HIV
• Jezlyn Abramowski ’26, Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health Research Project
• Yomi Adegbile ’25, Summer in Piste: Learning Beyond a Field School Experience
• Crystal Ordonez ’27, Indigenous Economic Resilience: Sustainable Finance and Community-Led Development with the Yanapuma Foundation
• Laurel Tollison, PhD Candidate, Slavic Studies, Reimagined Shores: Towards a Decolonized History of Kodiak Alutiiq Women
• Blanca Payne ’26, Spherical Timescapes in the Breakdown
• Henry Robbins ’26, Reframing Indigenous Slavery: Curriculum Development for the Stolen Relations Project
• Daiana Rivas-Tello, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Becoming Local: Pottery Production and Placemaking in the Mitmaq Community of Huancas
• Sherenté Harris, PhD Candidate, American Studies, Traditional Narragansett Mindfulness Perspectives

Join us for Day 1 of the 3rd Annual NAISI Spring Research Symposium! This symposium provides an opportunity for Brown University undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs to share their NAIS-related research and projects that they’ve developed over the past year. Dinner provided!

Day 1 presentations include:

• Ma’iingan Wolf Garvin ’25, CNAIS Capstone Presentation, Hiinuk and the Walnut Tree: Generational Knowledge Production and the Ho-Chunk Fable
• Nkéke Harris ’25, CNAIS Capstone Presentation, Retelling Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative
• Malia Honda ’25, CNAIS Capstone Presentation, Supporting Cultural Practitioners at Papahānaumokuākea
• Kiana Keli’i ’25, CNAIS Capstone Presentation, Building Sustainable and Effective Healthcare in Hawaiʻi
• Isabelle Meza ’25, CNAIS Capstone Presentation, Indigenous Resistance and Feminisms: Maintaining Ties and Continuing Knowledge Through Quilting
• Luiz Paulo Ferraz, PhD Candidate, History, Defying, Defending, Denouncing: Daniel Cabixi and the Internationalization of Indigenous Activism during Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964-1985)
• Allyson LaForge, PhD Candidate, American Studies, My History, Not Yours: Sarah Cisco Sullivan’s Nipmuc Advocacy
• Benjamín Córdova Herrera ’26, Wuskáukamuk Community Garden - New Grounds

About the Event

Join us for a collaborative event highlighting the K’iche’ language, which is widely spoken in Guatemala as well as in our local communities. Hear from professors and students in the Linguistics and Education Departments at Brown, from leaders at the Coalition for a Multilingual Rhode Island, and from teachers who recently traveled to Guatemala to learn from K’iche’ speaking educators and activists. Walk away with a few new words in K’iche’ as well as a deeper connection with some of our neighbors in Rhode Island.

About the Event

This community-building workshop with Kichwa artist Adina Farinango is open to all graduate students engaged with Indigenous communities and the arts. Explore your creative potential, learn about Adina’s artistic journey, and collaboratively design a piece that embodies the collective values of our diverse research community. This is an opportunity to connect across disciplines and borders through art and shared vision.

About the Artist

Adina Farinango is a Kichwa-Otavalo artist who uses art as an act of resistance, healing, and self-expression. Her art practice serves as a means to navigate and strengthen her own identity as an Indigenous woman within the Kichwa diaspora. Influenced heavily by the resilience and strength of matriarchs in her community—past, present, and future—she seeks to Indigenize spaces, centering the reclamation of space through a matriarchal lens. She is currently based in Lenapehoking (New York City).

2024-2025 Pembroke Center Research Roundtable

• Featuring:
• Susana Draper (Princeton)
• Avery Gordon (UC Santa Barbara)
• Tyrone S. Palmer (Wesleyan)
• Kali Rubaii (Purdue)

This roundtable will address forms of writing at the edge of life. It will consider modes of writing and artistic form that can respond to our current moment of racial capital, colonial enclosure and ecological devastation–inclusive of daily calamities and resurfacing joys. Dissolution, disturbance, and deformation are keywords for this coming together.

This event was organized by Postdoctoral Fellows Patricia Ekpo, Sarah Richter, María Gloria Robalino, and Eda Tarak. The event represents the culmination of the year-long Pembroke Center research seminar, “Unwriting the Anthropocene,” convened by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of Modern Culture and Media.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

Join Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology staff as we say goodbye to our Manning Hall gallery and share exciting updates on the museum’s future. Since 2005, Manning’s first floor has been the HMA’s campus home, welcoming thousands of people every year to exhibits, classes, workshops, talks, and more. The gallery will close on April 3rd so the space can serve a new mission. But it isn’t the end for HMA’s gallery and CultureLab—these programs will thrive again at HMA’s new facility at One Davol Square in downtown Providence, a public museum and research center set to open in early 2027. Staff will share perspectives on the past and future of Brown’s museum and answer community questions. Reception to follow.

Join us Wednesday, 4/2, for our monthly beading circle! Beading circle will be led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota). Supplies, tea, and cookies provided–no experience necessary!

Time & dates: 6-7:30pm, 1st Wednesday of each month (March 5, April 2, May 7)

Presentation by Wendy Wallace, Director of Civic Engagement, on principles of building trust in community-engaged work. Join this workshop for an opportunity to reflect on challenges related to mistrust, and engage in dialogue on how to build trust. Come learn how to introduce yourself to working with community partners, best practices, what to expect, resources, and how to be successful in your community engagement journey.

Location: Sciences Library Room 720, 201 Thayer St, Providence, RI 02912

Stephen Silliman is Professor of Anthropology at UMass Boston. Professor Silliman received his PhD. from UC-Berkeley with specialties in archaeological theory and the archaeology of Native North America. His interests include theories of identity, labor, material culture, and postcolonialism; collaborative indigenous archaeology; and the impact of post-Columbian colonialism on Native Americans. In addition, he studies the politics of heritage and Indigenous issues in the contemporary world. He has conducted field research in Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Texas, and Japan, but his current geographic focus is on southern New England. He works regularly with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut on issues relating to historic preservation and archaeological research, much of which has been conducted as part of his regular summer field school that has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Dr. Silliman has published three books: Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma (2004, University of Arizona Press), Historical Archaeology (co-edited with Martin Hall, 2006, Blackwell Publishing), and Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology (editor, 2008, University of Arizona Press). He has contributions in several edited volumes on the archaeology of colonialism and North America, and he has also published in a variety of leading anthropological journals including American Antiquity, American Anthropologist, Journal of Social Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, plus others.  

Ati Gunnawi Viviam Misslin Villafaña Izquierdo, is a young leader from the Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) and a cofounder of the Latin American Youth Climate Scholarship, a platform made up of 25 young activists from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. With experience advocating for and supporting grassroots initiatives for climate justice, Ati is also involved with the Cabildo Arhuaco Magdalena - Guajira, where she coordinates its advocacy efforts. In this seminar, she will share her work on climate justice and explore how Indigenous youth are reshaping climate finance.

Join NAIS for its first Lunch & Learn of Spring 2025! This series offers a unique opportunity to hear from NAIS-affiliated graduate students as they share their research in a relaxed, informal setting. Enjoy engaging presentations and stimulating discussions with fellow graduate and undergraduate students over lunch.

NAIS-affiliated graduate student Daiana Rivas-Tello will discuss her work, “Crafting Place: The Pottery Production and Placemaking of the Huancas Mitmaqkuna (Amazonas, Peru).”

Daiana Rivas-Tello (she/her/ella) is an anthropological archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at Brown University. She received her M.A. in Anthropology from McMaster University in 2017 and her B.A. in Archaeology and Latin American Studies from the University of Toronto in 2013.

Her work explores the intersections between imperialism, craft production, and Indigenous persistence in the Andes. As principal investigator of the collaborative A.H.E.A.D. Archaeological Project (Arqueología de Huancas y Estudios de Alfarería Doméstica), she works alongside community members, Peruvian archaeologists, and students to trace the history and pottery tradition of Huancas (Amazonas, Peru), a former Inka mitmaq colony, from the Late Horizon (ca. 1470-1535) to the present. Through this work, she explores how Andean communities respond to imperialism and the role crafting plays in placemaking.

The Engaged Scholarship Certificate program offers a transformative opportunity to integrate your academic coursework with meaningful community engagement, allowing you to deepen both your learning and your impact. Through this unique program, you’ll develop the skills to connect theory with practice, work collaboratively with community partners and contribute to positive social change while earning a certificate for your engaged academic work.

Join us to learn how you can participate in this distinctive program that combines rigorous academic study with community-based research and action. All undergraduate students are welcome to attend.

Register here! Lunch will be provided

Ati Gunnawi Viviam Misslin Villafaña Izquierdo is a young leader from the Arhuaco people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) and a cofounder of the Latin American Youth Climate Scholarship, a platform made up of 25 young activists from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. With experience advocating for and supporting grassroots initiatives for climate justice, Ati is also involved with the Cabildo Arhuaco Magdalena - Guajira, where she coordinates its advocacy efforts.

At this teach-in event, Ati will share her insights on organizing and alliance building for environmental and climate justice. She will discuss the territorial and global initiatives and collaborations she is part of, including her work in international fora. She will also share her experience with building common understanding and bridging communities. In addition to sharing her own work, Ati will be in conversation with attendees about their experiences and initiatives.

The tone of the meeting is informal and participatory. Food will be served!

Part of the Department of Anthropology’s Spring 2025 Colloquium Series

What does it mean to do archaeology with and for an Indigenous nation? How might it change the methods we use to document Indigenous heritage or even alter the stories we tell? Since 2014 Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology—a community-based partnership between UW archaeologists and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde—has created a Grand Ronde wayfor studying the past that shows us what is possible when we work together to remember and tell Tribal histories of survivance and settler colonialism.

About the speaker: Sara Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of Archaeology at the Burke Museum. Gonzalez works at the inter­sec­tion of tribal his­toric preser­va­tion, Indigenous Studies, and pub­lic his­tory. Her research specif­i­cally exam­ines how community-based par­tic­i­pa­tory approaches to research improves the empir­i­cal and inter­pre­tive qual­ity of archae­o­log­i­cal nar­ra­tives, while also sit­u­at­ing archae­ol­ogy within a more respect­ful and engaged prac­tice. This involves explor­ing the diverse appli­ca­tions of minimally invasive field methods and dig­i­tal media as tools for con­tribut­ing to the capac­ity of tribal com­mu­ni­ties to man­age their his­toric and envi­ron­men­tal resources. Centered on her ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with tribal communities in California, Oregon, and Washington, Gonzalez has devel­oped mul­ti­ple class­room, lab, and field school pro­grams that pro­vide under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate students with the oppor­tu­nity to par­tic­i­pate directly in research with tribal com­mu­ni­ties that con­tributes to their capac­ity to study, man­age, and rep­re­sent their heritage. She has coauthored numerous journal articles and in 2018 coauthored the book The Archaeology of Metini Village: An Archaeological Study of Sustained Colonialism. She is also an editor for Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas and the forthcoming volume What End for Epistemology in Archaeology? Indigenous Knowledges, Ontology, and Axiology in Archaeological Research.

Join the Gender and Sexuality Peer Counselors on Saturday, March 15th from 12-2 PM for a terrarium-making workshop at Stonewall House (22 Benevolent St)! We will lead with a discussion about climate change, ecofeminism, and Black/Indigenous land practices to set intentions before building our own little ecosystems. Pizza and terrarium materials will be provided! Space is limited, so please RSVP using the form below. We hope to see you there!

CALL FOR PRESENTERS!

Are you engaged in NAIS-related projects or research? The 3rd annual NAISI Spring Research Symposium is an opportunity for Brown undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines to share NAIS-related research, projects, and internships they have been working on over the past year, including Summer 2024.

Want to submit a proposal to be a presenter?

Please send a brief abstract (no more than 200 words) to ruth_torres@brown.edu no later than Friday, March 14th.

Learn more about the Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) concentration with NAISI DUS Mack Scott! This info session will provide an overview of concentration requirements and an opportunity to ask questions about how CNAIS can complement other concentrations. Join us for PIZZA and information!

Two long time members of the GPD community will present their ongoing research projects, followed by discussion.

This session we will hear from Archana Ramanujam, a PhD candidate in Sociology, who will discuss her project “Refining Inequality: Negotiating Environmental Policy in the Dutch Empire” and Luiz Paulo Ferraz, a PhD candidate in History, who will discuss his project “When Freedom Took Flight: Indigenous Leaders and the International Resistance Against Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1974-1980)”

2:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Reception to follow

What we commonly refer to as the “climate crisis” has also emerged as a crisis in academic discourse, one that conceals overlapping emergencies of environmental ruin, capitalism, and antiblackness. Ecocriticism has been seduced by metaphors of entanglement between the human subject and the nonhuman world. Through an insistence on this speculative mode of vitalism as an ethical and aesthetic praxis, many contemporary ecocritical scholars imagine their work as a form of political resistance or even redress to climate change. But what happens when one recognizes that the unity and legibility of the human subject has eroded? At “The Climate of Critique,” the second colloquium of the Limits of Legibility series hosted by the journal differences, Lynne Huffer (Emory), Axelle Karera (Emory), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown) and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York) challenge the increasingly dominant logic of humanist relationality to think the climate crisis without displacing the social and racial antagonisms that found it. Elizabeth A. Wilson (Emory) will moderate this half-day event.

Free and open to the public.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

Join us Wednesday, 3/5, for our first monthly beading circle! Beading circle will be led by Ph.D. student Olivya Caballero (Northern Arapaho/Sicangu Lakota). Supplies, tea, and cookies provided–no experience necessary!

Time & dates: 6-7:30pm, 1st Wednesday of each month (March 5, April 2, May 7)

Please join us for the Digital Humanities (DH) Salon! The DH salon series, hosted by the Center for Digital Scholarship, is a regular, informal presentation series bringing together digital humanities work across the Brown campus. Join us either in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (Room 137) on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library (w/ lunch!) or on Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/94514112608). 

This presentation will showcase a historical mapping project by Craig Howe from the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS) and Lukas Rieppel from Brown. In collaboration with the Center for Digital Scholarship and about half a dozen Brown undergraduate UTRA students for the past year, they produced an interactive GIS story-map to document the spatial history of Lakotan treaty lands and track an infamous military expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota that took place one hundred and fifty years ago. In addition, they also wrote eleven weekly articles in the Lakota Times newspaper to accompany the digital map, which mine the rich archive of documentary evidence produced during a particular week of that expedition for information about Lakotan history and culture.

About the Event

In this talk, Dr. Elizabeth Penry explores the little-studied yet rich world of what Indigenous Andeans made of Renaissance ideals. Dr. Penry challenges the assumption that the Renaissance was a singular phenomenon limited to Europe and understands it instead as a global movement of ideas. These ideas, carried globally by the Society of Jesus, the first religious order to take education as its mandate, included Mediterranean notions of rights and sovereignty grounded in ideas of civic humanism that became standard components of Jesuit pedagogy. Through Jesuit education and missionary activity in key sites like Juli and Potosí, Andeans gained Spanish language literacy and used it to navigate the colonial legal system, advocate for their rights, and challenge colonial hierarchies. Jesuits served a dual role as both enforcers of colonial order and, perhaps, inadvertent facilitators of Indigenous questioning of colonial domination, as their teaching of Renaissance civic humanism resonated with Andean concepts of reciprocity. Drawing on archival materials from Europe and the Americas, Dr. Penry highlights how Indigenous Andeans—commoners and elites alike—refashioned Jesuit teachings to assert autonomy, negotiate power, and reimagine their communities.

About the Speaker

Dr. S. Elizabeth Penry is a prize-winning historian of the colonial Andes and of Early Modern Spain. Her book, The People are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (OUP, 2019), won the Howard Cline Prize for Ethnohistory from the Conference on Latin American History, the Flora Tristán Prize for the best book on Peru from the Latin American Studies Association, and the Best First Book from the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, among others. An Associate Professor of History at Fordham University (New York) and former Director of Fordham University’s Institute for Latin American and Latinx Studies, Dr. Penry’s work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright, a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She currently serves on the board of the Renaissance Society of America. During 2024-2025, Dr. Penry is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. Her current research focuses on Spanish language literacy of Indigenous Andeans, and what they made of Renaissance ideas, introduced in part through their contact with Jesuit founded missions, schools and confraternities in the Viceroyalty of Peru.

About the Series

Graduate students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are invited to present their work at this roundtable luncheon series. Faculty and graduate student research presentations will alternate on a biweekly basis. All are welcome.

Beginning over 200 years ago, traditional Lakotan pictorial calendars, called “winter counts,” recorded events that members of each community experienced and considered important. These included interactions within the community here on earth as well as celestial events such as eclipses, comets, and the famous Leonid meteor shower in November 1833 that were visible in the Northern Plains skies. The touchstone of this presentation is a Lakotan winter count that records events from 1798 to 1919. Its event “glyphs” provide engaging origin points to explore Lakotan history and traditional narratives related to cosmology and star constellations visible in tonight’s sky.

Speaker Bio: Craig Howe, founder and Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), earned a Ph.D. in architecture and anthropology from the University of Michigan. He served as Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Howe has authored articles and book chapters on numerous topics, including tribal histories, Native studies, museum exhibitions, and community collaborations. He has developed innovative tribal histories projects and creative museum exhibitions, lectures on American Indian topics across the U.S., and provides professional development and cultural awareness training to schools and organizations. Howe was raised and lives on his family’s cattle ranch in the Lacreek District of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he is designing and building Wingsprings, an architecturally unique retreat and conference center that is featured in New Architecture on Indigenous Lands. He is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

CSREA’s New Book Talk Series highlights new and notable works that facilitate critical engagement with emerging scholarship. Join us for a thought-provoking book talk featuring Derek Taira, author of Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai’i, 1900-1941.

In this event, Taira explores how Native Hawaiians in the early territorial period resisted efforts to assimilate through public schools, instead using education as a tool to protect their cultural identity and sovereignty. By reframing the historical narrative of settler colonialism, Taira highlights Indigenous resilience, resistance, and hope for a more just and self-determined future.

This event will be moderated by Professor of Political Science Dean Saranillio of University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

This special seminar with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was open to Brown University students only. 

Confirmed participants received selected readings prior to the conversation as well as information about the location.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson also gave a public lecture at 5:30 pm on February 10. 

About the Speaker

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Her album, Theory of Ice (You’ve Changed Records, 2021) was short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project, “Theory of Water,” will be published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket Books in the spring of 2025. She is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson gave a talk, followed by a reception marking the launch of the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

About the Speaker

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which was short-listed for the Dublin Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Her album, Theory of Ice (You’ve Changed Records, 2021) was short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize, and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project, “Theory of Water,” will be published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket Books in the spring of 2025. She is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Seminar

Brown University students were also invited to a special seminar with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Tuesday, February 11 at 9:30 am.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

The Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice and the Brown University Library invite local K–12 educators to participate in The Teach-In: Black and Indigenous Histories which will focus on the Reimagining New England Histories curriculum.

This curriculum aims to introduce learners to some of the concepts, events, and people that are often left out of traditional historical narratives.

We believe that a more comprehensive understanding of the past will encourage a greater respect for the experiences of others and empower students to create more inclusive communities.

This unique two-part workshop series offers educators an invaluable opportunity to engage with the histories of Black and Indigenous communities in New England, learn from expert historians, and develop classroom-ready materials that bring these vital histories to life for students.

The Teach-In will be held Saturdays February 8 & March 8, 2025. The February 8th session will focus on the theme “Beyond the Feast: Reinterpreting the Wampanoag-Plymouth Agreement,” and the March 8th session will be about “Wading in the Waters: Black & Indigenous Voices of the Maritime Age.”

We hope that you will join us for each workshop which will include demo lessons, class sessions, presentations and Q&A sessions with breakfast and lunch provided. Each session takes place from 9 AM to 2:30 PM.

Space is Limited – Register Today!

Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of an important conversation on reimagining the history we teach. To register for these workshops, please sign up here.

Join the Department of English for “Joshua Whitehead’s Indigenous Love Letters: Whitehead as a Literary Character,” a presentation by doctoral student Choa Choi at noon on February 6.

Choi will discuss a nonfiction essay collection Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), an Oji-Cree/nehiyaw, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1) in Manitoba, Canada. In the collection, Whitehead memorializes the ontologically inseparable relationship between [body=text=land] through the register of the erotic and challenges the conceptualization of the self that is inherent in the syntactical structure of the English language. By foregrounding what it means to do a literary analysis on essays, Choi highlights how the polysemic nature of corpus illuminated by Whitehead re-orients the body as an organic machine, one that is not romantically vital but monstrously alive. Ultimately, Choi’s talk asks: what work is the literary doing in Whitehead’s act of animating himself into a character?

Update: New Date and Time!

The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion invites you to the Student of Color Check-In! This gathering is a space centered on our Students of Color, allowing us to reconnect, share experiences, and build connections within our community. While this space is designed with our Students of Color in mind, all students are welcome to attend.

Join us for meaningful conversations, community building, and a delicious brunch!

We look forward to seeing you there!

Do you want to use your education to make a difference in the world? Are you curious about how research can contribute to social change? Do you have a project idea—or the spark of one—that could make a difference with the right support?

If you answered yes to any of these, the Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research Program could be the perfect fit for you. In this info session, you’ll learn how the Laidlaw Scholars program supports students in undertaking research projects that meaningfully connect their academic interests with social impact. Come explore how this program can help you turn your passion into action. We can’t wait to see you there!

SEE PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT

Over the last three years, the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice (Simmons Center) has sponsored the development of lessons designed to provide K–12 teachers and students with curricular resources that foreground the histories and experiences of the Dawnland’s (New England’s) Indigenous and African-descended communities. Catalyzed by the Reimagining New England Histories Project(RNEH) the Simmons Center partnered with classroom educators, public humanities professionals, and scholars in a collaborative and iterative effort that resulted in the creation of four units of inquiry including: “Black Anti-Slavery Activists in 1850s Worcester, Massachusetts,” “Murals and Memory in Providence,” “Shifting Narratives: Thanksgiving and the National Day of Mourning,” and “People of Color in the Maritime World: The Inspiring Stories of Four Mariners.”

Please join us as we launch the Reimagining New England Histories K–12 Curriculum Project website and explore the resources being made available to the public free of charge. This event will feature talks by creators of the curriculum and provide the audience with an opportunity to navigate lessons and provide feedback. Lunch will be provided with registration.

The curriculum is made possible with support from the RNEH K–12 Curriculum Committee, a group composed of educators, community members, and scholars who work and live in the Dawnland; the Simmons Center; and the Mystic Seaport Museum.

Are you passionate about social change? Do you want bridge the gap between academic theory and real-world impact? The Royce Fellowship empowers students to pursue research that not only deepens their academic knowledge but also contributes to meaningful change in the communities around them.

Come to our Info Session to learn how this prestigious program can support your research ambitions with funding, mentorship, and a vibrant community of scholars. We’ll walk you through the fellowship’s structure and provide essential guidance for crafting a standout application.

Do you want to use your education to make a difference in the world? Are you curious about how research can contribute to social change? Do you have a project idea—or the spark of one—that could make a difference with the right support?

If you answered yes to any of these, the Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research Program could be the perfect fit for you. In this info session, you’ll learn how the Laidlaw program supports students in undertaking research projects that meaningfully connect their academic interests with social impact. Come explore how this program can help you turn your passion into action. We can’t wait to see you there!

Join the People, Place & Health Collective and the COBRE on Opioids and Overdose for our inaugural series on racial equity and methods. Over the course of four talks from leading experts, attendees will learn about rigorous methods for evaluating and addressing racial equity with respect to the nation’s overdose crisis.

Approaching Health-Related Research in Native American Communities

Native Americans have been greatly affected by the opioid epidemic, facing high rates of opioid use, overdose, and mortality. This talk will explore how culture and context influence health in Native American communities and highlight how Native Americans engage in the research process to improve community health and reduce substance use disparities.

About the speaker:

Dr. Gaines is a trained biostatistician whose work specializes in modeling the interactions between social conditions, geographic location, and individual characteristics using advanced spatial and statistical analyses from various study designs (cross-sectional, retrospective, and longitudinal). Her current research utilizes geographic information system (GIS) technologies to visualize and analyze the physical features of residential environments as it relates to unsafe sexual and drug using behaviors.

Please join us for “More than Meets the Eye: Maps, Indigenous Insurgency, and Colonial Imagination in the Great Chaco” on Thursday, December 12 at 12pm in the Music Room at 84 Prospect St. 

Maps can and have been taken lightly as objective illustrations of space, but, as we have learned from the field of critical cartography, there is much more to them than meets the eye. When dealing with stories of Indigenous Groups that were narrated as “enemies” or “hostiles” to colonial power, maps can provide exceptional avenues to investigate forms of existence that remained distant from written records. In this presentation, I propose an exploration of the diverse terrain and inhabitants of the alluvial plain of South America known as the Great Chaco - through intertwined readings of cartographical records and written accounts from the colonial period. By trying to reveal the visual complexes that define the Chaco, or by “making the map speak,” we come closer to the cultural functioning of these artifacts for literary and historical study. At the same time, we hope to bring the political organization and resistance strategies of highly mobile native groups of the South American Lowlands closer to us and comprehend their impact in a different light.

Laura Pensa is an anthropologist and PhD in Spanish. Her work focuses on Colonial and Postcolonial Latin America and Indigenous Studies. She is interested in insurgent Indigenous groups of the South American lowlands, cartography, archives, and contemporary Latin American literature.

Join the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies to learn more about its summer internship opportunities! At this panel, you will hear from former interns that participated in one of our offered internships: Human Rights Watch, Project Hope, Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA), Crisis Group, Refugee Dream Center, and the Gammadda Initiative.

Join the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at our final public program of 2024 as we host a special conversation about Iñupiaq life and culture in Alaska. We are honored to welcome Hannah Paniyavluk Loon (Iñupiaq), Instructor of Inupiaq language, University of Alaska, Chukchi campus in Kotzebue, and Norma Anallaq Ballot (Iñupiaq), Ivory carver and Selawik teacher of Inupiaq language, art, and culture, to speak with us about their experiences and communities in western Alaska. They are joined by their longtime friend and HMA collaborator Wanni W. Anderson, Adjunct Professor Emerita of Anthropology. Anderson is co-author with Douglas D. Anderson of the recent publication Iñupiat of the Sii: Historical Ethnography and Arctic Challenges (University of Alaska Press, 2024). The event is a rare opportunity for our campus to hear directly from Iñupiaq cultural practitioners working to educate and sustain traditions, communities, homelands, and Inupiaq self-determination.

6:00pm | Reception

6:15pm | Lecture begins

Supported by Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. National Park Service, and generous donors to Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum

Join us on Thursday, November 21st, 12-1pm for an informative discussion titled: Two-Spirit Peoples, Health, and Cultural Survivance. Presentation & discussion led by Chase Bryer, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, and PhD Candidate in Behavioral and Social Health Sciences.

Join Watson Institute Interim Director Wendy Schiller for an important discussion on the urgent issue of domestic violence among Native American women. With women on tribal lands facing disproportionately high rates of abuse, Schiller will explore the barriers to justice and the critical role of government protection in ensuring safety.

Cosponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative.

This conversation features Indigenous artists Olinda Yawar Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó, who both exhibited work in the Brazil Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Leila Lehnen, Chair of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Fall 2024 Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, will moderate. The conversation emerges from the graduate collaborative humanities seminar “Decolonial Futurities,” led by Lehnen and Macarena Gómez-Barris, which explores artistic responses to legacies of (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivist exploitation.

In Portuguese with English translation provided by headset.

Free and open the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

About the Speakers

Olinda Yawar Tupinambá, who belongs to the Tupinambá and Pataxó Hãhãhãe peoples, is a multi-talented journalist, photographer, screenwriter, director, curator, performance artist, filmmaker, and environmental activist. Her work “Equilíbrio” [“Balance”] was showcased at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. She has curated several festivals and film exhibitions, including the Cine Kurumin Indigenous Film Festival, Mostra Lugar de Mulher é no Cinema, and the first Indigenous Film and Culture Festival — FeCCI 2022. She also produced two film exhibitions: Mostra Paraguaçu de Cinema Indígena and Amotara — Olhares das Mulheres Indígenas (2021). In 2015, she earned a degree in social communication with a specialization in journalism from Faculdades Integradas Ipitanga (FACIIP). Through her artistic endeavors, she challenges and dispels racialized and stereotypical perceptions of Indigenous peoples. Her work serves to amplify ancestral voices, condemning historical and contemporary anti-Indigenous violence while also asserting the significance of Indigenous territories, bodies, existences, and expressions, underscoring the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples across time. Her work emphasizes that Indigenous individuals, cultures, and knowledges are integral to the contemporary world, drawing from the Indigenous past to redefine and update narratives of Indigeneity.

Ziel Karapotó is a visual multimedia artist, filmmaker, actor, and cultural producer hailing from the Karapotó community of Terra Nova, São Sebastião in the Brazilian state of Alagoas and currently residing in the Indigenous territory of Marataro Kaetés, Igarassu in the state of Pernambuco. His work has garnered recognition on both national and international platforms. Notably, his artwork “Cardume II” (2024) was showcased at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His short film “The verb became flesh” [“O verbo se fez carne”] (2019) received the prestigious “From Another Sky” [“De um outro céu”] prize in 2020. He has actively contributed to the research groups Ciência e Arte indígena no Nordeste [Indigenous Science and Art in the Northeast] (CAIN-UFPE) and Culturas de Antirracismo na América Latina [Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America] (CARLA-UFBA). Since 2021, he has served as the general coordinator of the Associação de Indígena em Contexto Urbano Karaxuwanassu [Association of Indigenous Peoples in Urban Contexts] (ASSICUKA). His artistic practice and knowledge-making are deeply rooted in the traditions of his ancestors, serving as a form of resistance and anticolonial strength, aligning with his belief in the enduring power of Indigenous art and science.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the Decolonial Futurities Speaker Series, and the Brown Arts Institute as part of the IGNITE series, with the support of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and the Brazil Initiative at the Watson Institute.

Join NAISI for its final Indigenous Artist in Residence events! 

A generative creative writing gathering that will explore attendees’ creative written work in a supportive environment, focusing on how we commonly, and uncommonly, document stories of survival. Participants will collectively explore and uncover their personal and/or researched accounts of survival within themselves, their families, or friends. 

Attendees, please bring the following: 

• • Pen/pencil 
  • Notebook of choice
  • 3 typed and printed hardcopies of their creative writing piece (6 page max)

RSVP below!

Artist Bio: Jacob L. Camacho is a CHamoru writer, educator, and activist. Originally from Guåhan (Guam) in the Mariana Islands, he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. He received his MFA from Rutgers University, Camden and his BA in English Literature from the University of Guam. His work has appeared in University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Literatures From Micronesia, TrailOff, Moonstone’s Featured Poets Anthology 2022, UOG’s
StoryBoard 18, and MadHouse Magazine. He is currently writing his manuscript, Talkboy, in which a CHamoru boy travels the world collecting stories in his talkboy recorder which was gifted by his grandmother. Unbeknownst to him, one of his tapes holds incriminating evidence that may alter a presidential election.

Learn more about the Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) concentration with DUS Mack Scott, supported by NAISI Executive Director Rae Gould. This info session will provide an overview of concentration requirements and an opportunity to ask questions about how CNAIS can complement other concentrations. Join us for PIZZA and information!

Join NAISI for its final Indigenous Artist in Residence events! 

Event description:

With much of our core memories and/or experiences surrounding survival, we often associate it with a particular point of view. Since point of view and tone are two literary devices of figurative language which separate one story from another, it forces the question: What happens when this discourse is disrupted and how willing are we (as the audience) to listen, or in some instances, change our point of view and tone? Relearning a story from another point of view, especially one which resides in tension, can sometimes be refreshing, humbling, or scary. And if there is anything storytelling teaches – it’s to continue learning.

Food provided!

Artist Bio: Jacob L. Camacho is a CHamoru writer, educator, and activist. Originally from Guåhan (Guam) in the Mariana Islands, he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. He received his MFA from Rutgers University, Camden and his BA in English Literature from the University of Guam. His work has appeared in University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Literatures From Micronesia, TrailOff, Moonstone’s Featured Poets Anthology 2022, UOG’s
StoryBoard 18, and MadHouse Magazine. He is currently writing his manuscript, Talkboy, in which a CHamoru boy travels the world collecting stories in his talkboy recorder which was gifted by his grandmother. Unbeknownst to him, one of his tapes holds incriminating evidence that may alter a presidential election.

Erin Marie Lynch is the author of Removal Acts (Graywolf Press, October 2023). Her poems appear in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Hugo House. She was born and raised in Oregon; she is a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles. . As part of the Literary Arts series on Poets and Poetry, Erin Lynch will be reading from her work and placing it into the context of contemporary poetry.

Join the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology as we welcome Deanna Byrd (Mississippi Choctaw), NAGPRA Associate Director at the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology as she discusses her career and work as an Indigenous professional engaged in repatriation work. Her presentation will cover a broad comprehensive approach with consultation considerations from a unique NAGPRA practitioner perspective.

Deanna Byrd is Mississippi Choctaw, and an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Deanna worked for her Tribe as the NAGPRA coordinator for nearly a decade and remains on contract for NAGPRA training and other special projects. Deanna started in her new role as the Associate NAGPRA Director at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in February this year. Since starting, Deanna has overhauled the entire NAGPRA process at PMAE, encompassing all programs on campus and fostering interdepartmental collaboration. Deanna enjoys spending time with her family and various traditional creative pursuits including weaving and beading.

This program is part of the Haffenreffer Museums 2024-2025 Programming Initiative to highlight Indigenous professionals working in the fields of tribal historic preservation and repatriation work, to discuss the intersection and overlap of these professions and how museums such as the HMA can best work to support them.

6:00pm | Reception

6:15pm | Lecture begins

Supported by generous donors to Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum.

About the Event

Please join us for a conversation with Shuar leader Juan Carlos Jintiach, which will examine the roles that Indigenous people are playing in climate advocacy and multilateral climate negotiations. Jintiach is currently Executive Secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC), an organization that advocates for Indigenous peoples and local communities across the Amazon, the Congo Basin, Indonesia, and Mesoamerica. He was short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 and was featured in the inaugural list of the world’s 100 foremost environmentalists of 2024 by The Independent.

In his community of Ichuurku, Napo Province, Ecuador, he has also led micro-entrepreneurship projects and is currently spearheading a business collective that supports the cultivation of Guayusa tea and cacao, while fighting the imminent threat of mining in the region. The talk will be held in conversation with Dr. Deborah Delgado Pugley, Cogut Visiting Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

About the Speakers

Juan Carlos Jintiach, a leader from the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, currently serves as the Executive Secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities. His life’s work revolves around the fierce defence of indigenous rights and territories, spanning from confronting oil companies and mining operations to representing indigenous voices on the global stage in the fight against climate change. Born into a lineage of Amazonian leaders, Juan Carlos’s journey includes active
participation in indigenous movements, like the historic collective effort against “Bloque 24”; and serving in key roles such as Co-Chair and Focal Point for the Indigenous Caucus of the UNFCCC. Now leading the Global Alliance, he unites indigenous peoples and local communities across continents, with the view of ensuring their rights to self-determination and ownership over their sacred territories. Despite his prominent public role, he is committed to his community in the Napo province in
Ecuador. Facing imminent mining threats in his own territory, Juan Carlos remains steadfast in his commitment to safeguarding indigenous lands. Alongside his wife and four children, he embodies resilience, strength, and an unwavering dedication to the collective rights of his peoples.

Deborah Delgado Pugley, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a Visiting Scholar at KU Leuven. She is also a Research Associate for the Andes Amazon Program at the Field Museum in Chicago. Her scholarly work primarily investigates environmental and climate policies in the tropics. With her extensive fieldwork across the Amazon regions of Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil, Delgado-Pugley has spearheaded research initiatives focused on climate change, Indigenous Peoples movements, human rights, natural resource management, conservation, and gender.

Co-Sponsors Climates Solution Lab

Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

The Comp Lit DUG invites you to come share chilling tales from your home culture with us! You can find us in Corliss-Bracket, room 106 at 5:30 pm on October 30.

This event is part of Anthropology’s Fall 2024 Colloquia Series

Speaker: María Elena Garcia, Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This presentation offers a preliminary discussion of the afterlives of war in Peru, with a focus on Quechua narratives that foreground violence against more-than-human kin. Garcia engages critically with the archived testimonies of Quechua survivors, testimonies collected as part of the work of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She also begins to think about the possibilities opened up through the various counter-archives produced by Quechua artists, scholars, activists, and others. Quechua survivors insist that the lives of their non-human kin matter, even as processes of justice-seeking and reparations in Peru promote a humanrights framework that at best sidelines those concerns. How can Indigenous testimonies and counter-archives open up alternative forms of justice? How do they unsettle existing frameworks that continue to perpetuate colonial hierarchies? Through an analysis of Quechua narratives, Garcia explores what the contours and limitations of the archive suggest for decolonial and multispecies forms of justice in Peru.

This student-centric workshop is an opportunity for students to hear tribal leaders from various sectors share stories of leadership, career and life paths, and experiences. We hope the ensuing conversations will inspire and encourage students to understand their own leadership styles, to learn new ways to lead, and consider the value of occasional detours on courses already charted. Our guests include elected tribal First Councilman Cassius Spears, Jr. (Narragansett), Dr. Bryan Brayboy (Lumbee), higher education thought leader and dean of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy, and Dr. Cedric Woods (Lumbee), director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston.

Dinner from Kabob and Curry will be provided!

This event is limited to Brown students. 

Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America. A Book Talk with Camille Owens, with Kristen Maye (Mount Holyoke) as discussant

Like Children argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white men’s power at the top of humanism’s order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhood’s modern arc—from ignorance and dependence to reason and rights—that structured white men’s power in early America: by claiming that black adults were like children, whites naturalized black subjection within the American family order. Demonstrating how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or possess stable boundaries.

Like Childrenrecenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black children’s power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as “Bright” Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century “Harlem Prodigy,” Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately, Like Childrendisplaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black children’s historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the human in their own acts.

Free and open to the public.

Camille Owens is an assistant professor of English at McGill University, and works at the intersection of black studies, disability studies, and the history of American childhood. She is the author of Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America(NYU Press, 2024), and has published essays in American Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She received her PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale in 2020, and held a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2020 to 2023.

Kristen J. Maye is the Clara Willis Phillips Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Her research resides at the intersection of cultural studies, critical feminism, and literary theory, taking up questions of knowledge production and disciplinarity. Maye completed her PhD in Africana Studies at Brown University in 2023, and also works as an Associate Editor with differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

NAISI Tribal Community Member in Residence (TCMR) Ruth Torres (Schaghticoke) is hosting a lunchtime conversation with Narragansett First Councilman Cassius Spears, Jr., Dr. Bryan Brayboy (Lumbee, dean of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy), and Dr. Cedric Woods (Lumbee, director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston). Eric Henson (Chickasaw, Harvard University) will moderate the conversation.

This event is for Brown community members only. For more information, please contact ruth_torres@brown.edu.

Join us on Saturday, October 26th from 12-2pm for a panel on Indigenous Health and Wellness across Turtle Island and Oceania with Brown University’s Ph.D. student in Behavioral and Social Health Sciences Chase Bryer (Chickasaw Nation), University of Vermont’s Research Assistant Professor Carlos Andrés Gallegos-Riofrio, and University of Guam’s Professor of Social Work Tricia Lizama (CHamoru).

The panel will take place at Mencoff Hall, Rm. 205 (68 Waterman St., Providence, RI 02912). Lunch will be provided for all attendees.

This panel is part of a two-year long Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series in Global Indigenous Studies co-led by Kevin Escudero (Brown), Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Brown), Keith L. Camacho (UCLA), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA). The series examines new directions in Global Indigenous Studies by centering research and community-engaged approaches from the Americas and Oceania.

Dr. Vicente Diaz (Pohnpeian Carolinian and Filipino from Guam) will deliver a keynote lecture on Friday, October 25th from 6-8pm at Andrews House, Rm. 110. Dr. Diaz is a Professor of American Indian Studies at UCLA and a Past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

His lecture is entitled, “Indigenous Resurgence through Trans-Indigenous Canoe Relationalities and Materialities, Or Why Native Canoes for Critical Indigenous Studies?” Dinner will be served to all attendees who RSVP.

Please RSVP here: https://forms.gle/Wg645ZaJdycC54Ss8

This keynote lecture will launch a two-year long Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series in Global Indigenous Studies co-led by Kevin Escudero (Brown), Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Brown), Keith L. Camacho (UCLA), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (UCLA). The series examines new directions in Global Indigenous Studies by centering research and community-engaged approaches from the Americas and Oceania.

In this panel, Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu), Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), and Bathsheba Demuth (settler) discussed how the idea of “careful guessing” can contribute to our encounters and ways of thinking with the other-than-human world in the past and present. Looking at environments from Hawaii to Alaska to Antarctica, the discussion touched on new work in Native American and Indigenous Studies, the environmental humanities, and ways of narrating the world around us.

About the Speakers

Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu/Eyak) is Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2025 and takes up Indigenous literature and theory on race, indigeneity, and anti-coloniality in polar spaces. She also serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is the recipient of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Best First Book Award and the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Nominations Committee for NAISA. She also sits on the Editorial Boards of the NAIS, Food, Culture, and Society, and Critical Ethnic Studies journals.

Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She is an environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. For more than two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, she has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.

Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.

Brown2026— the faculty-led endeavor to use the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to explore the past and the future of the American democratic project and the research university’s role in American civic culture— is hosting two informal October gatherings to jump start curricular offerings for the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 academic years.

The steering committee is eager to support team-taught interdisciplinary courses on themes and questions that fall within the Brown2026 charge from President Paxson, as well as to nurture offerings in all divisions and at all levels (including first-year seminars) that would invite undergraduates to grapple with the distinctive role of the university in democratic societies as well as the legacies of the American Revolution.

To begin that conversation, Dean Rashid Zia and Professor Seth Rockman will host two informal October gatherings to meet interested faculty, generate ideas for potential courses, and discuss logistical support for such endeavors. The first meeting will be an informal breakfast on Oct. 8. The second one - a late afternoon gathering on Tuesday, October 22. Please feel free to contact Dean Zia or Seth Rockman for more details. In the meantime, please dream big about potential courses that can help students engage in this important moment.

Join the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology as we welcome Christopher Sockalexis (Penobscot), Penobscot Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, he discusses where his work intersects as a tribal official, cultural tourism guide, artist and archaeologist.

In addition to his work as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Penobscot Nation, Chris is currently conducting research for his Masters of Science degree at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, with his thesis work focusing on Cultural Identity and Maritime Adaptation in Frenchman Bay, Maine. Chris is also artist, and cultural tourism guide, and is one of the lead singers of the RezDogs, an intertribal powwow drum group based out of Indian Island, Maine. He serves on the Abbe Museum Board of Trustees and is also an avid canoe and kayak paddler who loves being out in the Maine woods and on the waterways that his ancestors have traveled for thousands of years.

This program is part of the Haffenreffer Museums 2024-2025 Programming Initiative to highlight Indigenous professionals working in the fields of tribal historic preservation and repatriation work, to discuss the intersection and overlap of these professions and how museums such as the HMA can best work to support them.

6:00 pm | Reception

6:15 pm | Lecture begins

Supported by generous donors to Shepard Krech III Lecture Fund.

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for our Fall 2024 Lunch & Learn Series! This series offers a unique opportunity to hear from NAIS-affiliated graduate students as they share their research in a relaxed, informal setting. Enjoy engaging presentations and stimulating discussions with fellow graduate and undergraduate students over lunch.

Date & time: October 15th, 1:00-2:30pm                                                      Location: NAISI Office, 67 George Street, Room 205 

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ Cogut Visiting Professor Jamille Pinheiro Dias will speak on “Indigenous Arts and Epistemic Justice: Collaboration, Circulation, Internationalization.”

About the Speaker
Jamille Pinheiro Dias is the director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the co-director of the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at the University of London, where she also works as a Lecturer. She was previously a von der Heyden Fellow and an affiliate faculty member at the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Amazon Lab at Duke University. Prior to working in London, she was a Research Associate at the University of Manchester as part of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her studies involve the environmental humanities, Amazonian cultural production, Indigenous arts, and translation studies in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil.

About the Series
Graduate students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies are invited to present their work at this roundtable luncheon series. Faculty and graduate student research presentations will alternate on a biweekly basis. All are welcome.

Brown2026— the faculty-led endeavor to use the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to explore the past and the future of the American democratic project and the research university’s role in American civic culture— is hosting two informal October gatherings to jump start curricular offerings for the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 academic years.

The steering committee is eager to support team-taught interdisciplinary courses on themes and questions that fall within the Brown2026 charge from President Paxson, as well as to nurture offerings in all divisions and at all levels (including first-year seminars) that would invite undergraduates to grapple with the distinctive role of the university in democratic societies as well as the legacies of the American Revolution.

To begin that conversation, Dean Rashid Zia and Professor Seth Rockman will host two informal October gatherings to meet interested faculty, generate ideas for potential courses, and discuss logistical support for such endeavors. There will be a breakfast meeting on Tuesday, October 8, and a late afternoon gathering on Tuesday, October 22. Please feel free to contact Dean Zia or Seth Rockman for more details. In the meantime, please dream big about potential courses that can help students engage in this important moment.

A reading by Natalie Diaz followed by a conversation between the author and Brown University professor Macarena Gómez-Barris.

About the Speakers

Natalie Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship, and a USA Fellowship. She was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is currently the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is the Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and the director of the Center for Environmental Humanities at the Cogut Institute. She is author of At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press, forthcoming), Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (University of California Press, 2018), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), and Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2009). She also co-edited Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) with Herman Gray. She is series editor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press with Diana Taylor.

This event was a part of the Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series, which brings high-profile speakers in the humanities to the Brown University campus. Each visit includes a public lecture and a separate seminar-style meeting with undergraduate students.

See Photos from all Fall 2024 Lunch Talks

In many ways, Rhode Island is synonymous with obstinance. Rogue Islanders—the derisive nickname given to the fledgling settlement by the leaders of New England’s more orthodox colonies—were the first to establish religious freedom, outlaw slavery, and renounce their allegiance to the English crown. Rhode Island was also the last of the original thirteen colonies to sign the U.S. Constitution two years after the new government was already in operation. However, located within this proud history of firsts and lasts is the little-known fact that Rhode Island served as a pioneer in creating the processes by which Euro-Americans sought to dispossess and disappear Indigenous Nations. This talk examines the conditions and choices that abetted Rhode Island’s effort to detribalize the Narragansett Nation in 1880.

Simmons Center Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavery and Justice Mack Scott is a historian, educator, and member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. His work focuses on the intersections of race and identity and employs agency as a lens through which to view and understand the voices, stories, and perspectives of traditionally marginalized peoples. He is currently working on a project that traces the history and experiences of the Narragansett Nation into the modern era.

Lunch provided with RSVP.

In the light of current domestic and international events, we are at a moment at which political discourse in and about the academic classroom is both particularly pressing and particularly fraught. Classroom discussions may become unusually heated, or, to the contrary, students may already seem politically exhausted and disaffected—both of which pose challenges for teachers hoping to engage their students in academic and civic life. And not only are there challenges around the emergence of politics in the classroom; the academic classroom itself has emerged as a political issue, with partisan debates about what should be taught and how—and with those debates having especially significant implications for pedagogy and scholarship regarding gender, sexuality, race, and ongoing imperialist violences. How should we best negotiate the complexities of politics inthe classroom, politics aboutthe classroom, and the politics ofthe classroom itself?

This event from the Pembroke Center’s “LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative” is designed to provide a space for participants actively to engage with these questions. While we will be spurred by an introduction (Lynne Joyrich, LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative Director and Professor of Modern Culture and Media) and by brief opening reflections by members of the Brown community—Nadje Al-Ali (Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies), Isaac Essex (PhD Student in American Studies), Katie Rieser (Director of Teacher Education and Senior Lecturer in Education), and Andre Willis (Associate Professor of Religious Studies)—all attendees are encouraged to participate in open discussion.

All interested Brown and RISD faculty, teaching staff, and teaching graduate students are invited to register. RSVP https://www.eventbrite.com/e/politics-and-pedagogy-political-discourse-in-and-of-the-classroom-tickets-999629838757. 

Indigenous archaeologies have often been praised for uplifting the voices of marginalized communities and contributing to more equitable forms of archaeology. However, even Indigenous archaeologies can cause trauma for Native communities. While the colonial origins and ongoing colonial structures of archaeology are significant sources of this trauma, they are not the only factors. The examination of historical colonial violence, alongside contemporary experiences of similar injustices, can be emotionally taxing for Native individuals, contributing to challenges in recruiting and retaining Native scholars in the field. This talk employs a landscape archaeology approach to analyze how recent events—specifically the Mauna Kea vs. TMT conflict, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Lāhainā fires—demonstrate the enduring impact of colonial landscapes on Native Hawaiian communities. Although anthropology cannot eliminate this trauma, Danielle Kalani Heinz proposes that new frameworks be developed within the field that draw from cultural humility, trauma-informed pedagogies, and archaeologies of the heart to encourage archaeology to serve as a space for healing. 

Danielle Kalani Heinz is Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her research focuses on developing culturally rooted environmental activism through collaborating with the Native Hawaiian community, integrating Native Hawaiian ways of knowing, conducting microbotanical and isotope analysis, and analyzing historical documents. As an educator, she utilizes Hawaiian culture based education to demystify archaeology and environmental studies by making these studies more relevant to students.

Heinz received her Ph.D. in Hawaiian Archaeology from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation is entitled, “A Microbotanical Based Approach to ʻIke ʻĀina in Nā Wai ʻEhā, Maui: Edible Plants as Tools of Hawaiian Survivance in the Past, Present, and into the Future.” 

Join us for a creative design and aesthetic workshop led by Silvermoon LaRose, artist, educator, and assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum!

Participants will have the opportunity to create a logo or slogan for a t-shirt that incorporates local Indigenous knowledge and aesthetics. T-shirts will be used to create more awareness about the programming and curricular offerings associated with NAIS and CNAIS at Brown. 

Who should attend? Brown community members whose academic, personal, cultural, or social interests include celebrating Native American and Indigenous cultures, experiences, histories, and peoples. All skill levels welcome! Food and supplies will be provided.

Please join us on Thursday, September 26 from 4:00-5:30 in the Conference Room of Meiklejohn House (159 George St.) for a talk by Lúcia Sá (University of Manchester), What the Waters and the Stones Say: Listening to the World in Brazilian Indigenous Literature and Art.

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

In line with other recent Indigenous cultural production from Brazil. which emphasizes the importance on non-human subjects for the understanding of collectivity and ancestral belonging, this paper will focus on the role of rivers and stones in written and visual works by Ezequiel Vitor Tuxá and Gustavo Caboco.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Lúcia Sá is from São Paulo. She is professor of Brazilian Studies at University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Rainforest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Cultures (2004, Minnesota University Press), Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo (Routledge, 2007), and many articles on Brazilian and Latin American literature, cinema, and visual arts. She was principal researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Network “Racism and anti-racism in Brazil: the case of Indigenous peoples,” and led the Brazil strand of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Brazil: the case of Indigenous Peoples, also funded by the AHRC.

The Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative and the University Rainbow Staff Alliance invite all LGBTQIA+ faculty and staff, as well as friends and allies, to join us for a mixer to start the academic year. We’ll gather at the Faculty Club for appetizers and socializing. RSVPs are encouraged for planning purposes.

Climate related disasters present one of the greatest threats to the global economy, society, and cultures. When disasters occur, the serious disruption of everyday functioning that overwhelms families and communities, exposes societal inequities. The Pacific is one of the most natural disaster-prone regions on earth, this lecture focuses on the resilience of Pacific peoples and its global diaspora.

Join the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies’ visiting fellow, Siautu Alefaio-Tugia, Pacific Professor of Psychology at University of Otago, New Zealand, to hear about her research on Pacific Island resilience in the face of climate change.

About Dr. Siautu Alefaio-Tugia:

As a scholar-practitioner Siautu uses her 20 years of psychology practice and research to shine a light on cultural ways of knowing and being that push psychology outside of the box. Her work in family violence, humanitarian response, and disaster resilience focus on Pacific diaspora as key mobilizers in climates of change. She has spent over a decade working at the School of Psychology Massey University and leads as Associate Dean Pacific in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rutherford Discovery Fellow and Global Fellow of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at Brown University. Of Samoan descent from the villages of Matautu-Tai, Sāsina, Manunu ma Fagamalo, Siautu’s pioneering publication Pacific-Indigenous Psychology disrupts psychology to focus on how the world of Oceania think, know, and live. Today she helps others go beyond uncharted waters to reveal what has been there all along - our own transformational treasure.

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative on September 11 for our Fall Welcome Back Gathering!

We warmly invite Brown University students, staff, and faculty to reconnect and celebrate the start of the new academic year. This event is a wonderful opportunity to meet new members of our community, learn about exciting developments, and engage with fellow colleagues and peers. We hope to see you there!

**Rain Location: 67 George St Rm 104**

Learn more about the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery Justice at our fall welcome lunch. Meet Brown students, faculty, staff and community members who are working with the Center’s various research clusters, study groups, and educational initiatives. Discover how you can get involved and stay connected with the Center’s work!

Lunch will be provided. Please let us know if you plan to join us by filling out the RSVP Google Form.

In this workshop, students will learn about making medicine pouches. Basic leathercrafting skills will be used, and at the end of the class students will be able to take home their finished product! 

• Introduction to leathercrafting, safety, and materials
• Cutting leather and tools used for various leather
• Hole-punching for stitching and stitching chisels 
• Various stitching methods, such as whip stitching, saddle stitching, and running stitch 

Open to Native/Indigenous and NAIS students & faculty. Hands-on leather pouches workshop. RSVP to ensure supplies are available– limited space available.

Artist Bio: “Greetings. My name is MaryCorn Naranjo. I am from Nambe Pueblo and Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. I am an Indigenous Leathercrafter. I specialize in medicine pouches, Native regalia, bags, and any other fun things I can get my hands on. My business is called Wii Jiya Leathers. ‘Wii Jiya’ in my language means ‘One Mother.’ I started my business last year alongside my best friend.

I started doing leathercrafting when I was a teenager; at the time, only making regalia for the men in my family. I started with Tandy Leather Supply three years ago, when I lived in Colorado Springs. I used leathercrafting as an outlet for sobriety. I used every chance that Tandy gave me to teach myself everything I could about leathercrafting. The learning process is never-ending. Every day is something new.”

Storytelling comes from a place of warmth. It draws ever-changing connections between home, family, memory, and culture. This generative, crafty workshop aims to introduce a series of tools, ideas, and curiosities to storytellers of all levels, but especially those looking to dip their toes into creative writing for the first time. Workshop will consist of a short discussion asking the question: what is creative writing? And a guided session of open writing prompts!

Artist Bio: Danielle Shandiin Emerson is a Diné writer from Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Her clans are Tłaashchi’i (Red Cheek People Clan), born for Ta’neezaahníí (Tangled People Clan). She has a B.A. in Education Studies and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. Danielle writes fiction, poetry, plays, and creative essays. Her work centers Diné culture, perspectives, and personal narratives. She is currently the 2023-2024 Associates of the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence, working on a collection of YA contemporary Diné short stories. She is also the Summer 2024 NAISI Indigenous Artist in Residence at Brown University, a 2024 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2024 Diné Artisan + Author Capacity Building Institute Fellow, and a 2024 GrubStreet Emerging Writers Fellow. Danielle’s work is published and forthcoming in Poets.org, Yellow Medicine Review, Kweli Journal, swamp pink, Chapter House Journal, and others.

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for our Spring 2024 Lunch & Learn Series featuring intimate presentations from NAIS graduate students. The Lunch & Learn series is a chance for NAIS graduate students to informally share their research with other NAIS graduate and undergraduate students over lunch in the NAISI office (67 George St Room 205) from 1:00-2:00pm. Lunch will be provided. 

In this workshop and educational session, participants will learn how to make Hawaiian lei out of eyelash yarn, and learn about the cultural and historical context of this kind of lei. As we spin the fluffy yarn to mimic the look of the Hawaiian finch feathers, we’ll also talk about how cultural practices like lei-making and gifting are tied to Indigenous land and sovereignty.

Makana Kushi (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) is a 6th year PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University originally from Hilo, Hawaiʻi. Her research explores ethnic and racial hierarchies in Hawaiʻi through Hawaiian language newspapers and family and oral history. As a beneficiary of the kula kaiapuni (Hawaiian language immersion school) movement, she is dedicated to the cultivation of Indigenous resurgent educational spaces, and hopes to explore the resurgent potential of teaching Hawaiʻi history both in and outside of the academy. 

Recommended for ages 14 and up.

Materials can be provided at no cost and mailed for up to 20 participants in RI, MA, or CT. You can also follow along at home with your own materials.  Materials can also be picked up from the Museum during business hours.  Please fill out the Google Form to reserve your space and materials.

Space is limited to 30 participants and is on a first-come, first-served basis. After submitting this form, you will receive registration confirmation from Museum staff.

Free and open to the public. Pre-registration required via Google Form.

Supported by generous donors to the Barbara Greenwald Memorial Arts Program fund.

STEM disciplines in higher education often center and reinforce Western epistemologies and pedagogies, which includes the perception that STEM is objective and not situated in a global context or community. Advancing equity and inclusion in STEM calls for anti-racist pedagogies to reach those students who are marginalized by systems of oppression.

Reimagining the STEM Field: Indigenous Identity and Higher Ed features a conversation between Amanda Tachine (Arizona State University) and Christina Smith (Diné) (Brown University) about the systemic mechanisms that impact Native American student experiences in Higher Education with a specific focus on STEM fields and explores ways of reimagining educational development and departmental programming to better support Indigenous learners. This discussion is a CSREA Faculty Grant Event organized by Dr. Christina Smith, Associate Director for Undergraduate STEM Development at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University.

In this discussion driven presentation, Practitioner in Residence for Tribal Engagement, endawnis Spears (Diné/Ojibwe/Choctaw/ Chickasaw) provides some of the key understandings necessary to work with and for tribal and Indigenous scholars and communities. endawnis highlights important terminology for Indigenous peoples and the context-specific application and nuance associated with each term. Participants gain an introductory understanding of the contemporary tribal landscape in and around Rhode Island and resources for further learning. We will also discuss ways to engage ethically and effectively across communities. Students, faculty, and staff welcome!

Thursday, April 25, 2024 from 2:00pm-3:30pm
*Food will be provided!

Sponsored by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the Office of Community Engagement at the Brown University School of Public Health

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for our Spring 2024 Lunch & Learn Series featuring intimate presentations from NAIS graduate students. The Lunch & Learn series is a chance for NAIS graduate students to informally share their research with other NAIS graduate and undergraduate students over lunch in the NAISI office (67 George St Room 205) from 1:00-2:00pm. Lunch will be provided. 

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for our Spring 2024 Lunch & Learn Series featuring intimate presentations from NAIS graduate students. The Lunch & Learn series is a chance for NAIS graduate students to informally share their research with other NAIS graduate and undergraduate students over lunch in the NAISI office (67 George St Room 205) from 1:00-2:00pm. Lunch will be provided.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden will read from recent literary work and discuss Native American literary, cultural, and historical issues in this public talk, moderated by Vanessa Lillie. Following the reading, he will discuss the work with the audience.

About the author

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is the author of Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins), winner of twelve literary awards and named one of the 100 best genre novels of all time by Time magazine. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next pick, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named a Best Book of the year by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Guardian, and other magazines. He has short stories appearing in the anthologies Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, Denver Noir, and others. He’s the editor of the Native Edge series at the University of New Mexico Press, and is the recipient of fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee, and Tin House. He’s Professor of Native American Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver and serves on the faculty of the Pan-European MFA Program and Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University.

About the moderator

Vanessa Lillie is the USA Today bestselling author of Blood Sisters, a new series centered on the stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which was a Target Book Club pick and GMA Book Club Buzz Pick, as well as a best mystery of the year from the Washington Post, Amazon Editor’s and Reader’s Digest. Her other thrillers are Little Voices, For the Best and she’s the creator and coauthor of the # 1 Audible Charts bestseller, Young Rich Widows, set in Providence, RI where she lives, with a forthcoming Audible Original sequel and print edition. Originally from Miami, Oklahoma, she is a proud citizen of the Cherokee Nation.


Co-sponsored by the Department of Literary Arts

About the Event
Between 1820 and 1920, the largest single population of human remains in American museums like the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, and Harvard’s Peabody was from the Andes. By collecting these “ancient Peruvian” mummies and skulls, anthropologists sought a foundation for the historical study of race worldwide. But in doing so, they compounded a far longer struggle for the ancestral dead in the Andes—one that began when Spain invaded the empire of Tawantinsuyu in 1532 and confiscated its Inca ancestors. This longer history of the theft of Indigenous bodies makes clear the responsibility of U.S. museums to the history of supposedly more distant populations, whose racialization fueled grave-robbing throughout the Americas. But it also reveals how Peruvian intellectuals and grave-openers, some of Inca and Andean descent, used the dead to transform their study, curating these “scientific ancestors” as evidence of historical precedence, sovereignty, climactic care, healing, and national belonging. This work preceded North American efforts at decolonization by decades, if not centuries, and challenges our understanding of what it might mean to mummify a museum.

About the Speaker
Christopher Heaney is a historian of Latin America, with research interests in the history of science, indigeneity, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. He is the author of two books. His most recent, “Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology” (Oxford University Press, 2023), is a history of the collection and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas, spanning from the 16th century to the present. His prior book, “Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu” (2010), was a history of Yale University’s conflict with Peru over the excavation of Machu Picchu, and advocated for the return of the site’s human remains and gravegoods to Peru. It was published in Spanish as “Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas” in 2012. His third book will be a history of the colonial laws regulating grave-robbing in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World, and their assault upon Indigenous sovereignty.

At Penn State, he trains undergraduate and graduate students in Colonial and Modern Latin American history, the history of Peru and the Incas, the history of science, and the cultural history of United States-Latin American relations. His approach to teaching presumes a Latin America that has always been modern, and an Americas and Atlantic World shaped by movements, infrastructures, and knowledges of Native peoples. In 2012, he co-founded and was the Editor-in-Chief of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden will discuss the numerous criminal justice policies enacted by the U.S. government that harm Native American nations and their citizens, and how these laws contribute to the growing problem of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives. He’ll discuss the Major Crimes Act, federal sentencing regulations and other governmental policies, and he’ll read a short selection from his award-winning novel, Winter Counts.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is the author of Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins), winner of twelve literary awards and named one of the 100 best genre novels of all time by Time magazine. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next pick, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named a Best Book of the year by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Guardian, and other magazines. He has short stories appearing in the anthologies Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, Denver Noir, and others. He’s the editor of the Native Edge series at the University of New Mexico Press, and is the recipient of fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee, and Tin House. He’s Professor of Native American Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver and serves on the faculty of the Pan-European MFA Program and Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University.

Learn about Wampanoag adornment and history-keeping traditions during this 2 hour wampum art demonstration. The artist will bring wampum and weaving she created during her residency at Brown University. This event is open to the public.

Please join us for the opening reception for the 44th Annual Juried Student Exhibition! Refreshments will be provided.

The 44th Annual Juried Student Exhibition will be on view at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts from March 16 through April 10, 2024. This year’s exhibition is juried by Jessica Brown and Sháńdíín Brown. Learn more about the exhibition and jurors here.

Join Elizabeth James-Perry, Aquinnah Wampanoag Master Artist and Culture Bearer and one of two Spring 2024 Artists in Residence at NAISI, to learn the art of weaving with Cornhusk, an indigenous weaving material known for its sustainability and local sourcing, using small wooden looms. Explore a variety of techniques as the artist shares insights into the use of non-toxic, environmentally friendly natural dyes. Capped at 25 participants, RSVP recommended. 

Join the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) for our Spring 2024 Lunch & Learn Series featuring intimate presentations from NAIS graduate students. The Lunch & Learn series is a chance for NAIS graduate students to informally share their research with other graduate and undergraduate students over lunch in the NAISI office (67 George St Room 205) from 1:00-2:00pm. Lunch will be provided. 

Talk Description

Imperial Unsettling, Professor Kevin Escudero’s second book manuscript in progress, examines the potential for solidarity and coalition building between Indigenous CHamoru and Filipinx immigrant communities as part of their participation in Guåhan’s decolonization movement since 1950. A present-day U.S. territory in the western Pacific Ocean, Guåhan (Guam) is the southernmost island in the Mariana Islands archipelago and home to the Indigenous CHamoru people. As part of its colonial past and present, the island has been ruled by Spanish, Japanese, and American forces. In 1950, the U.S. Congress signed the Organic Act of Guam which conferred U.S. citizenship upon CHamorus who currently comprise a third of the island’s overall population. Comparatively, Filipinx immigrants make-up another third of the population and have a long history of migration to the island facilitated by Spanish and American colonial networks. CHamoru activists have, since the onset of U.S. colonial rule in 1898, mounted a campaign to reevaluate the island’s political status and relationship with the United States government. In recent decades these efforts have coalesced into calls for a plebiscite vote which would allow the island’s people to engage in a process of self-determination by contemplating different political statuses, including independence. Current legislation for a pending plebiscite vote would prioritize the perspectives of the “native inhabitants of Guam and their descendants.” The question has thus emerged of how to center CHamoru perspectives while also taking into account the role that other communities might play in these efforts for Guåhan’s decolonization. Rooted in archival, ethnographic, and interview-based research, Imperial Unsettling develops a framework of “kinship solidarity” to argue that CHamoru and Filipinx activists in Guåhan have importantly drawn upon their own familial and social ties in envisioning and enacting a decolonial collective future, one which prioritizes the liberation of both communities.

Speaker Bio

Art surrounds us, every day, in every way. It is entangled in the mundane and the exceptional. The act of creation, in all its many forms, is art. Explore how the reclamation and preservation of tradition can help us see the art around us and appreciate the art within us.

Join the Haffenreffer Museum for our annual program of Gather. Make. Sustain: a series of workshops, artist talks, and demonstrations featuring Indigenous artists who work in a variety of mediums. Learn how these artists create environmentally and culturally sustainable artwork, as well as maintain traditional knowledge systems through the act of gathering materials and stories.

Silvermoon LaRose is a member of the Narragansett Tribe and the assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum. She has worked in tribal communities for over 20 years, serving in the areas of health and human services, education and humanities. As a public servant, Silvermoon serves on the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and as the secretary for the Charlestown Conservation Commission. Additionally, she is the vice chair for the Avenue Concept supporting local public art ecosystems. As an artist and educator, she hopes to foster Indigenous empowerment through education, community building and the sharing of cultural knowledge and traditional arts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, a minor in Justice Law and Society from the University of Rhode Island and a partially completed Master’s in Rehabilitation Counseling from Western Washington University. 

Light refreshments to follow.

Free and open to the public.  

Supported by generous donors to the Barbara Greenwald Memorial Arts Program fund.

Workshop Description

Chickasaw scholars Lokosh and Kari Chew define, ‘counterstories’ as “stories of those ‘whose experiences are not often told,’” and suggest such stories are “a critical means to engage in resistance to dangerous, colonizing, and Eurocentric writing.” (2021:6). How do we tell stories that haven’t yet been told? How do we choose between telling a story through poetry, non-fiction, or a graphic novel? What sources do we use (and how do we find them)? Can the land be an archive? How do we read and Indigenous-authored book from the 17th century dismissed for historical inaccuracies or Indigenous stories described as myths? This workshop will examine the methods and modes of writing Indigenous counterstories using examples from current and previous research projects.

This is a workshop for NAIS-affiliated undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Please RSVP to attend. 

Speaker Bio

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science. She is the co-editor of the Studies in Language and Gender series at Oxford University Press.

Her research interests sit at the intersections of Indigenous language futurism (including language reclamation & revitalization); Queer Indigenous Studies; Speculative fiction and poetry; NAGPRA & repatriation; and collaborative/community-based methods. Her research has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Gender & Language, Language & Communication, Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, and The Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship (forthcoming), among others. Her 2022 poetry manuscript, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series, and her creative work has most recently been published in Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and exhibited at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

She is the recipient of two book prizes: the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (University of Arizona Press, 2018) and the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for her co-edited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2021, she received the Dynamic Woman of the Year Award from the Chickasaw Nation, which is given annually for significant contributions to the Chickasaw Nation and its people through community engagement and work preserving its linguistic and cultural heritage.

From 2019-2022 she served as the Chancellor’s Fellow of Indigenous Research & Ethics. In that role, she worked to develop initiatives, including a campus-wide NAGPRA office and Tribal Liaison postion, to ensure that the University is knowledgeable about and in compliance with U.S. and tribal government policies and protocols. She currently serves as the co-chair of the campus NAGPRA Advisory Committee and as a member of the Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains (TCETHER) of the American Anthropological Association.

This event is part of Anthropology’s Spring 2024 Colloquia Series

This talk is an exploration of Indigenous languages from the perspective of Indigenous language futurism—a way of re-seeing (and re-hearing) the past, present, and future of Indigenous languages through Indigenous perspectives that allow us to recognize the languages and their speakers that always, already, surround us and permeate our daily lives, from the names of Manhattan, Chicago, and Tulsato the availability of Star Wars: A New Hopein Diné (Navajo).

Colonial narratives have been predicting the inevitable disappearance of Indigenous languages for hundreds of years, and the United States and other colonial governments have been enacting policies and practices to try to create that reality for more than two centuries. Whole communities were removed from their homelands, generations of children were forced to attend boarding schools where speaking Indigenous languages resulted in psychological and physical punishment, and Native American religious practices were illegal until the 1970s. Yet, today Indigenous people still sing, prepare foods, tell jokes, and celebrate important events in our languages. There are hundreds of language programs spread throughout the United States to help children, adults, and whole families learn their languages. This is more than a story about dictionaries or grammars (although they are a part of it); it is about Indigenous poetry, science fiction, digital technologies, reconnecting with materials in archives, and language activism. This includes video games in Iñupiaq (Inuit) and Kanyenʼkéha (Mohawk), memes circulate over Facebook and Instagram in Ararahih’uripih (Karuk) and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), there are acronyms for texting and instant messaging in Chikashshanompa’ (Chickasaw), and the latest film in the Predator franchise can be watched with Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ̲ (Comanche) audio and subtitles. Far from merely ancient or extinct relics of some distant place or past era, Indigenous languages have existed in what is now the United States for millennia, and if Indigenous people(s) have anything to say about it, they will be spoken for thousands more. 

Speaker: Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and the founding co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science. She is the co-editor of the Studies in Language and Gender series at Oxford University Press. Her research has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language & Communication, Gender & Language, Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, and The Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship, among others.

Her 2022 poetry manuscript, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series. She is the recipient of two book prizes: the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (University of Arizona Press, 2018) and the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for her co-edited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2021, she received the Dynamic Woman of the Year Award from the Chickasaw Nation, which is given annually for significant contributions to the Chickasaw Nation and its people through community engagement and work preserving the cultural heritage.

She currently serves as the co-chair of the UIUC campus NAGPRA Advisory Committee and as a member of the Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains (TCETHER) of the American Anthropological Association.

Rounding out this semester’s Indigenous Curators Series, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology welcomes Shándíín Brown (Diné), Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) and Tess Lukey (Aquinnah Wampanoag) as they participate in a panel discussion moderated by Kimberly Toney (Hassanamisco Band Nipmuc). They will each speak to their experience as Indigenous women living in the Southern New England region and working in non-Indigenous spaces as changemakers and trendsetters who are working to revolutionize and Indigenize the field. Learn about their curatorial philosophies, practices and work to impact and uplift Indigenous voices that have long been silenced or absent in museum work.

Sháńdíín Brown is a scholar, creative, and citizen of the Navajo Nation from Arizona. She is the inaugural Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum. Brown holds a BA in Anthropology and Native American Studies with a minor in Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College.

Erin Genia is a tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. She is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and community organizer whose practice merges Dakota cultural imperatives, pure expression and material exploration with the conceptual. Erin has an MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT an MPA – Tribal Governance from The Evergreen State College.

Tess Lukey is a curator, artist, and member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). She is the inaugural Associate Curator of Native American Art for the Trustees of the Reservations. She received her MA in Native American Art History from UNM and a BFA in Art History and Ceramics from MassArt. She has co-curated shows Collecting Stories: The Invention of Folk Art (2021) and A Little Bit of the Southwest (2022) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lukey’s newest exhibition, Beauty and Usefulness (2023), at Fruitlands Museum, explores the intersection of function and aesthetics in both Native and non-Native art forms from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Reception to begin the event.

Free and open to the public. Supported by generous donors to Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum.

This convening invites attendees to speak in ways that are commonly excluded from public space. We will gather alongside Carrie Mae Weems’ Seat or Stand and Speak (2021), on view at The Lindemann Center’s Nelson Atwater Lobby. By centering excluded languages, together we engage in acts of insurgent multilingualism to draw attention to and refuse the legacies of genocide in linguistic practice, past and present.

The activation will consist of three components: first, a sharing session with live and pre-recorded spoken and signed language, music, and other sound works; second, an immersive mini language lesson; and third, a screening of This Is Their Land (2022, 16:30 runtime, dir. Michael O’Leary), likely one of the first films scripted and filmed in maqlaqsyals (a tribal name for Modoc and Klamath languages).

Interested in sharing, presenting, speaking, and/or contributing something asynchronously? Please complete this form! There are no prohibitions or requirements on what languages you can use or how you can use them. You don’t need to be “fluent” to participate nor do you need to avoid linguistic mixing or innovation. All genres are welcome. Feel free to interpret the activation’s description and prompts as broadly as you are comfortable!

About the Activation: The elimination of indigenous, racialized, and minoritized peoples does not end with destruction of bodies but targets survivors’ livelihoods, ways of life, and voices, as well. In recognition of this, Beyond Babelwill work to protect the use, adaptation, and innovation of languages whose users have been targeted by violence, alienation, and appropriation. In this communal space, we will collectively strengthen our relationality through language; challenge practices that limit linguistic use, adaptation, and innovation; and challenge colonial social orders and ways of knowing.

Against the colonial assumption that languages must be “complete,” consistent, and standardized, we will stage partial connections, collaborative meaning-making, orality without literacy, literacy without orality, the refusal of totality, the refusal of mastery, and the refusal to assume that we are entitled to effortlessly know the meaning(s) of what another person has shared. Among the many results of genocide, languages of the land—now known globally as Indigenous languages—are rarely if ever heard in public; many of us never speak non-English languages publicly; and many of us can speak without reading/writing, or write/read without speaking. Against this violence, we will gather to listen, to speak, to write, to sign, to share, some of us with understanding(s) but most of us without. And that will be the point.

The Lunch & Learn series is a chance for NAIS graduate students to informally share their research with other NAIS graduate and undergraduate students over lunch in the NAISI office (67 George St Room 205).

Kimonee Burke is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Brown University and a citizen of the Narragansett Tribe. She received her Bachelor’s in Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and her Master of Studies in U.S. History from the University of Oxford. Kimonee studies New England Indigenous history and the impact of federal policies on tribes in the region. Her current dissertation analyzes the role Christianity and tribal churches in successful administrative petitions for federal acknowledgment in southern New England.

A panel workshop for Brown and RISD instructors on negotiating complex questions of identity in the classroom at a time when such questions remain both pressing and fraught. Brought to you by the Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative.

This workshop invites participants to discuss how best to negotiate the complexities of identities and identifications in the classroom at a time when considering scholarly and pedagogical questions through the prism of these terms remains critically important even as it seems to become ever more fraught. University offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and academic disciplines that consider formations of identity, are currently under attack in terms that must be critiqued and resisted. At the same time, bureaucratic, administrative, and regulatory demarcations of identity categories have their own problems and can be inadequate to the multi-dimensional complexities of subjectivity, the historical and cultural formations of community, and the affective texture of selfhood and sociality, and so they perhaps unwittingly participate in some of the very discourses and divisions they seek to combat. How then can we, as scholars and educators, best think through these issues, and thus best address not only academic subject-matter in the classroom but our students as themselves complex subjects who matter in the current political, social, and intellectual (or often anti-intellectual) climate? Such questions will be posed in some initial reflections by fellow teacher-scholars and then in open conversation.

Discussants will include:

• Leon Hilton (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Emily Owens (History)
• Alexander Weheliye (Modern Culture and Media)
• Tali Hershkovitz (Ph.D. student, Religious Studies)

Free and open to teaching faculty at Brown and RISD. RSVP required.

Event accessibility information: to bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

This event is part of Anthropology’s Fall 2023 Colloquia Series

Highlighted in the growing body of work on decolonial archaeologies, epistemic structures within archaeological research remain fraught with colonial designs and false simulations of Indigenous peoples . There also appears to be a new anxiety that the time of interrogating grand epistemological questions (i.e., how should archaeological knowledge be produced) is fading in archaeology as community-based research and ontological perspectives increase in popularity . Integrating Indigenous epistemologies into archaeology is often suggested as a potential remedy for both issues, however it is unclear how serious archaeology takes Indigenous storytelling. Practitioners of Indigenous Archaeology advocate for a balanced yet still selective incorporation of Indigenous knowledge alongside western epistemologies and practices ⸺ and less frequently ⸺ an asymmetrical commitment to Indigenous wisdom and ontologies as the visionary foundation for imagining archaeology as one domain of ancestral storytelling.

This talk is commitment to the latter and examines power relationships in storytelling through different Indigenous Californians’ refusals of Indigenous alterity as epistemic cures for settlers and archaeologists’ issues.

Information shared in this talk is indebted to the knowledges of and approved by collaborators from the Payómkawichum (Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, Cultural Center), Tongva (Ti’at Society), and Acjachemen (Juaneño-Acjachemen Blas Adobe Culture Center) descendant communities.

Speaker:  Dr. Nathan Acebo , Professor of Anthropology and  Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), University of Connecticut