Research Focus Group Roundtable and Workshop: Celebrating Restorative Relations: Connections between climate resilience, Indigenous rights, and land & water rematriation

Join us for a roundtable discussion and workshop with guest speakers— featuring conversations between Indigenous and allied movement builders, practitioners, and organizers— exploring connections between climate resilience, Indigenous rights, and land & water rematriation. This will be an opportunity to gather and address relationships between Land Back movements and politics, processes of reciprocity, and resilient ecosystems, as well as the importance of decommissioning and dam removal within energy transitions, among other responses to global climate change. We invite everyone to join in celebrating ongoing acts of resistance and restoration— collective actions of reviving relationships of care and connectedness between peoples, lands, waters, and multispecies kin.

Our guest speakers:

Sarah Barger is the Development Director of Kīpuka Kuleana, a Native Hawaiian women-led land trust that works to protect cultural landscapes and family lands on the island of Kauaʻi, HI.
Sibyl Diver is co-director for the Stanford Environmental Justice Working Group, doing community-engaged research on Indigenous water governance within Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds.
MariaElena Lopez is is a member and Tribal Representative of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation and Founding Director of Su’nan Protection, Art & Cultural Education (The SPACE).
Margaret McMurtrey is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Academic Coordinator of the UCSB American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program.
Teresa Romero is an enrolled member of the Coastal Band of Chumash and president of the collaborative Native Coast Action Network supporting cultural and traditional ecological initiatives.

Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Climate Justice Working Group Research Focus Group, CREW Center for Restorative Environmental Work, LiKEN, the Indigenous Speakers Series, and UCSB’s American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program