AIIC 2021 8th Annual Symposium: Native Feminisms

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The Eighth Annual AIIC Symposium, “Native Feminisms: Centering American Indian and Indigenous Land and People,” seeks to focus Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, trans, non-binary, and two spirit people. As Mishuana Goeman shows, drawing attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality foregrounds relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as methods of knowledge creation. Relevant topics to broader discussions of Native feminisms include: embodiment, futurity, spatiality, memory, trauma, ecological relationality, community knowledge, emergence, collective power, ceremony, decolonization, education, reclamation, and felt theory.

The AIIC Symposium seeks to explore how Native feminist cartographies help us remap and reimagine the relationship between people, kin, communities, temporality, and the land. We hope to raise questions about public space and protest, environment and ecological knowledge, storytelling, violence, education, Indigeneity, decolonial thinking, gender, and multiraciality. We embrace non-linear, relational understandings of time, and presenters will address historical issues of cartography, contemporary remappings, and embodied relationships to history, knowledge creation, and the land, as well as the intersection of such topics.

Keynote Speakers: Mishuana Goeman and Laura Harjo

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program and Associate Director of American Indian Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her doctorate from Stanford University’s Modern Thought and Literature and was a UC Presidential Post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley. Her research involves thinking through colonialism, geography and literature in ways that generate anti-colonial tools in the struggle for social justice. Her book, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) was honored at the American Association for Geographic Perspectives on Women and a finalist for best first book from NAISA. “The Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrance Malick’s the New World,” is in progress with the Indigenous Film Series, University of Nebraska Press. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Wicazo Sa, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Transmotion, and American Indian Cultures and Research Journal. She has guest edited journal volumes on Native Feminisms and another on Indigenous Performances.

Dr. Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar teaching Indigenous Planning, Community Development, and Indigenous Feminisms. She is an Associate Professor in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She was raised in Sapulpa by Mvskoke parents that were active in Mvskoke community and Muscogee (Creek) Nation politics; Harjo is a lifelong student of emancipatory community processes. Dr. Harjo earned a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Southern California, and her research and teaching centers on Indigenous spatialities, community caretaking, Indigenous feminist community planning praxis, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives and anti-violence, artivism and community engaged knowledge production. She is the author of Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which employs Mvskoke epistemologies, and Indigenous feminisms to grapple with a community praxis of futurity.

Cosponsored by the American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group (AIIC RFG); Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC); UCSB American Indian Graduate Student Alliance (AIGSA); UCSB American Indian and Indigenous Student Association (AIISA); UCSB Associated Students; UCSB Department of English; UCSB Graduate Division; UCSB Graduate Student Association (GSA); UCSB Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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