​I was honored to attend and present at the 5th Annual Native American Studies Symposium at UC Davis. I enjoyed a pleasant Amtrak ride from Santa Cruz to Davis admiring the overcast sky and the Northern California atmosphere. Davis, like Santa Cruz, is filled with so much natural beauty but appreciated how flat the land is in Davis!
 
I identify myself as a women of color who has indigenous Zapotec roots, but don’t necessarily self-identify as Zapotec because of my U.S. upbringing. This was my first event that I attended filled with Native peoples from all over the U.S. I learned about the ways in which different groups from throughout the Americas continue to hold onto their oral histories and traditions. As I grow older, the more I realize the need to conserve my indigenous identity. During this event, I valued the presentations by the graduate students emphasizing indigenous methodologies and epistemologies. There was a salient emphasis on knowing the land, respecting nature by taking just what one needs, and recognizing the spirits of the land (as mentioned by the keynote speaker Dr. Dian Million). By showing us pictures of her family, Dr. Million reminded us of the necessity to cherish our families while we jump through the hurdles of graduate school.
 
This symposium left me with an idea some frameworks that I would like to incorporate including Linda Tuhiwai Smith's, Decolonizing Methodologies and Dr. Million’s book Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights.
 
I have a lot of homework to do and my presentation about generational trauma and memory made me realize how I failed to include the literature of Native American scholars or Mixteca epistemologies, but I’m so happy to know that there are safe spaces such as the symposium where it is okay not to have the answers yet but to work through the problems. It was especially nice to have people come up to me after my presentation and provide me with additional reading material and/or comments.

​Candy Martinez is a second year doctoral student in the Latin American and Latina/o Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Her research examines the discourse of memory and generational trauma in cine comunitario films, particularly contemporary films focusing on Oaxacan communities. Candy is interested in alternative ways of rethinking about trauma and healing methods. 

The 5th  Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium Transitioning from the Fifth Sun: Global Indigenous Movements is coming up this week! The symposium will be held Thursday, May 5th through Friday, May 6th at MU II (Memorial Union) at the University of California, Davis. We are looking forward to hearing everyone’s presentations and having engaging dialogue.

In addition to our scheduled panels, on Thursday, May 5th we will have our creative hour and luncheon where participants will share their creative work.

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker for Friday, May 6th will be Dr. Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) from the University of Washington. 
Currently Dr. Million is an Associate Professor in American Indian Studies and an Affiliated faculty in Canadian Studies, the Comparative History of Ideas Program, and the English Department at UW. Dian Million’s most recent research explores the politics of mental and physical health with attention to affect as it informs race, class, and gender in Indian Country. She is the author of Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (University of Arizona Press, Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies Series, 2013) as well as articles, chapters, and poems. Therapeutic Nations is a discussion of trauma as a political narrative in the struggle for Indigenous self-determination in an era of global neoliberalism. Reading unprecedented violence against Indigenous women and all women as more than a byproduct of global contention Therapeutic Nations makes an argument for the constitutive role violence takes in the now quicksilver transmutations of capitalist development. As an active writer and poet she strives to bring experiential and felt thought to classrooms.

We hope that you are able to join us for these exciting events! Check out the Symposium 2016 page for the schedule.

Please click on this link to register for our symposium:  http://goo.gl/forms/9dhpFzrTfj

Check back to see pictures from our symposium!
​

Rebeca Figueroa
2014-2015 NAS Graduate Student Representative; Coordinator for the 4th Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium; 2013-2015 Eugene Cota-Robles Fellow; 2014-2015 UC Davis Graduate Student of Color Scholar

Conference Presentations (Fall 2014-Spring 2015):

4th Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium (Davis, CA), April 24, 2015
“’Ethnic Indians’”: Rights and Responsibilities of de-Indigenized Peoples”

Awards Received (Fall 2014-Spring 2015):

·      Native American Literature (NAS 5) Associate Instructor for 2015-2016
·      2015-2016 Campus Organizing Director for the UC Davis Graduate Student Association
·      2015-2016 Graduate Student Researcher for the UC Davis Social Justice Initiative
·      2015 Chicana/Latina Foundation Scholarship Recipient

Life’s Accomplishments:

I am very excited and proud of myself for having completed my second year of graduate school! It has been two stressful, yet enlightening years that have allowed me to grow mentally and emotionally. Aside from graduate coursework, this school year I (alongside the amazing planning committee!) kept busy with planning our department’s annual graduate student symposium.

On another note, this summer I became a proud aunt for the fifth time! Therefore, a great accomplishment for me has been to travel down to Los Angeles more often and visit my family. Additionally, I just recently adopted a dog from the Woodland Animal Shelter. These new additions to my life have turned this stressful (due to the preparation for the qualifying exams!) summer, into a joyous break.

What are you going to do this summer?

For most of the summer I will be working for the City of Woodland through their Summer Teen Pack program. Also, I will be studying for the qualifying exams, which I will be taking in Winter Quarter of this upcoming school year. Additionally, I will be lesson planning for the NAS 5 courses that I will be teaching for the first time this year.

Aside from all this busy work, I will also be enjoying nice, long walks around my neighborhood and I will be taking advantage of the $5 Tuesday movie nights that I do not get to enjoy throughout the school year. 

In January, having started a seminar on Native literature with Professor Inés Hernández-Ávila, I determined that it was finally time to read Dark River. If ever there was a time that it would be appropriate, this was it. But before I even began reading, I learned a lot of information that gave me pause. I learned, for example, that Louis Owens had taken his own life in 2002. I learned that he had been a Professor in English and Native American Studies at U.C. Davis at the time. I learned that his papers are held in the Shields Library special collections. I even learned that Inés Hernández-Ávila herself had co-authored an obituary for a memorial service held at U.C. Davis.

I was unsettled. I couldn’t help but think about Dark River every day, his last novel, and the wound that his death must have carved into this intimate department. Was it really fair for me to come in over a decade later, completely ignorant, and stir up all these feelings again? And could I really entitle myself to go and look at Louis Owens’s papers, knowing that he may never have intended for them to end up where they did? I’m from Minnesota, for god’s sake! I don’t know any better!

I tried to talk through my concerns with whichever unfortunate person happened to be in my presence. I carried Dark River around with me. After all, I was supposed to be writing a paper on it! Papers are serious business! The more I stared at the cover, the more its allure piqued my curiosity. Despite my misgivings, I could not help it. I was obsessed. I read the book.

What I found was an intensely woven narrative, filled with life, death, and tricky symbols that undoubtedly make English majors feel incredibly clever when they notice them. There is a very sharp humor there, that does not so much invite you to laugh as grimace as it lances the sore of an ugly truth and allows the pus to ooze out. Owens draws your attention to the very construction of narrative itself, with characters troubling the boundaries of the meta and synthetic from the natural and diegetic.

So I wrote about it. I wrote about the story of the “surviving twin,” and argued that Dark River is really about life more than it is about death. And while I still mostly agree with what I claimed, it does not really make me feel any better. Something about that writing still felt hollow. Perhaps it was simply that I had never found myself facing an academic project that felt so real, and so menacing. Perhaps it was that Dark River draws my attention to the synthetics of academic writing for its artificial dryness. Or maybe the paper just needs to be revised.

But, in any case, I never could bring myself to request boxes of his papers to go through. I invented a barrier for myself: writing the email to the special collections themselves. How does one start such an e-mail? “Dear Special Collections”? “Dear Shields Library”? “To whichever kindly bureaucrat it may concern”? But the real reason that I didn’t send the e-mail is because I was afraid of what I might find, that I might see something that it is not really for me to see. I felt like Louis Owens would be sitting in the room with me, irritated by my presence, and I couldn’t bring myself to go there. I rationalized that I could read Dark River perfectly well without needing to read his papers, so I didn’t. And that was when I thought I was done meeting Louis Owens.

We spend countless hours in the Native American studies conference room, bound on two sides by walls of books. It’s not really a library, since no one can check them out, and I was informed that it would be for the best if I didn’t touch any, since someone had meticulously ordered them by last name and it would be a damn shame if someone were to change that.

And so, with the vague threat that I might somehow get into a negligible amount of trouble for fondling some books that aren’t mine, I was content to spend most of my time staring at whomever was making a salient point, or gazing into the convoluted inner sanctum of some middle chapter in a book that I didn’t really understand and barely even read, or marveling at Dian Million’s face, projected to several times its typical size through the sorcery of Skype and the tangles of cords that erupt from the podium in the corner of the room. 

But even with these wonders, I could not help but look at the damn books. For most of winter quarter, I was fixated on the adjacent copies of Arctic Voices, because of their visual positioning just a few feet above SimHayKin Jack’s head. With all due respect to the editors, I could not imagine why a library without patrons might need a second copy of Arctic Voices.

The process repeated itself. I’d go to a seminar, sit on the far side of the table, amble through some verbal entanglements of my own creation, and look at those copies of Arctic Voices. That was, until spring quarter, when I finally noticed Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire, hidden near floor level on the shelf nearest to the door. I noticed it because I was already reading my own copy of Drowning in Fire, because Mark Rifkin convinced me that I wanted to read it. Before, it had always blended into the background of books-I-shouldn’t-want-to-read-since-I’m-not-supposed-to-touch-them. But I knew its binding now, and it blazed into my vision, a shimmering sigil of recognition. I could look at it because I already had it, and so I could acknowledge its presence and return to whatever dire tome we were reading instead with no sense of longing.

I realized, eventually, that I wasn’t done writing about Dark River. During Professor Steven Crum’s ethnohistory seminar, it struck me that Dark River is a historical document in its own right. It may be fictional, but it contains innumerable potent critiques of history, and fits, with a certain self-awareness, into a genealogy of Native American fiction that focuses on Native veterans returned from overseas wars.  

So I wrote about Dark River again; this time, more frantically, and less coherently. I wrote about whatever my caffeine-stricken consciousness desperately suggested, and I filled the pages. With some revulsion at what I had done, I printed it out and stapled it together. I staggered my way through my presentation, truncating my arguments with nervous laughter, and then it was finally over. No one could force me to write another damn word. I was drawn to Netflix, drowning in Firefly, dreaming into tomorrow the delusions of literary grandeur on my horizon.

But it wasn’t quite right. I saw so many posts on Facebook eulogizing the year in graduate school madness and felt like I should say something for myself. But it didn’t really feel like I had earned any catharsis to speak of. After complaining about my exhaustion for months, I had nothing to say for myself having finished the year.

A week later, Inés Hernández-Ávila e-mailed me asking for help in clearing out her office for the ill-advised three-way room-exchange she dreamed up one day. Well, I thought, at least I could do something productive seeing as I just spent an entire week watching Netflix and reading Game of Thrones fan-fiction.

Bayu Kristianto was there as well, and we worked through the folders, sorting files that hacked out their last dusty gasps before being laid to rest in the recycling bin. After hours of sifting and shredding, I found myself alone in the conference room, staring at the bookshelf in front of me. Given a few minutes as a break, I walked over to the shelf and looked at it.

On the very bottom shelf, I saw a stack of programs from Louis Owens’s memorial service at U.C. Davis. I found that odd, that they might be there, and that they had been there since before the first time that I had ever walked into the conference room. I looked for Dark River, and found his novel Nightland instead. No one was around to tell me what to do, and quite frankly by this point I wouldn’t have listened anyway. I carefully marked the book’s place, pulled it off the shelf, and opened it up to see what year it was published.

To my surprise, Owens had signed it. I stared at the book for a few moments, before quickly putting it back. I definitely was not going to be the first-year graduate student that accidentally damaged the department’s signed copy of Nightland. I looked at those shelves, seeing Grass Dancer, seeing novel after novel, and my eyes returned once again to Drowning in Fire.

I sat down in the nearest chair and pulled that book, too, from its place. The light slicked off its unctuous surface like oil in the rain. And then I opened it, and sat in stunned silence. There was the briefest of notes, from Craig Womack to Louis Owens, and I thought about the book’s publication in 2001, and Owens’s death in 2002, and how perfect the binding was, and how starched stiff the pages were, and how I was seeing something never meant for me, and I stared at the page, and my eyes welled up, and I cried silently, in the Native American Studies conference room, alone with Louis Owens’s unread copy of Drowning in Fire.

And then I put the book back in its place on the shelf, and I saw how everything had converged, just for a moment, and I realized that I had spent a year staring at a shelf full of Louis Owens’s books, a silent public archive that was always staring back at me. I guess I cried because of the thought that Louis Owens didn’t read Drowning in Fire, although I hope that he did, but maybe it was because I hadn’t cried since I had left Minnesota nine months ago, and now that the year was over, it was finally time to set myself free—if only for a few moments.

This is the story of how I met Louis Owens. And most of it is true. 

Congratulations to Sandra who passed her Qualifying Exams this year! 

As we are reaching the end of the school year, I look back at the accomplishments I have achieved and cannot be anything but grateful for such an amazing year. After three years as a Ph.D. student in the Native American Studies department at UC Davis I finally took my qualifying exams and began my dissertation fieldwork research in Michoacán, Mexico. However, taking my qualifying exams has been a challenging and exciting journey. As the average graduate student, the thought of going through the qualifying exams brings in lots of anxiety and stress. After finalizing my third year in the Ph.D. program, I planned my summer break very carefully and tried to maximize both my study and writing times as much as I could. While I focused my time on writing my statement and reviewing books and articles in preparation for the exams, I still had quite a bit of reading to do, which meant my summer would not be as relaxing as the previous years. When surrounded by plentiful of work to do, being strategic is very useful although certain strategies do not always work. During the first weeks of my summer vacation, I spent most of the days reading, in an effort to review most of the works I would discuss during my qualifying exams. At the same time, I would spend a few hours at night creating outlines for my statements, which meant that I would go to sleep feeling more stressed out. As I became quite close to having a panic attack, I was able to complete a fair amount of reading and thus decided to change my studying strategies.

A few months before, I had applied to a graduate research grant competition to carry out archival work in Mexico over the summer. Therefore, the summer prior to taking my qualifying exams was very productive as I conducted archival dissertation research in Mexico. I think that having the opportunity to interact with people in my community and being out on the field allowed me to think through the entire process and better organize my ideas and writing methods. When I arrived to Mexico in July, I was worried about not being able to focus enough time and commitment to my study as I would be busy doing research and fulfilling other family responsibilities. Nonetheless, as the end of the summer approached, I realized that I actually was able to write a lot while also taking care of my other obligations. Somehow spending most of the day at the archives and getting together with my family members over the weekend to celebrate somebody’s birthday or attend local fiestas in my community released some of the anxiety and negativity and helped me remain focused on the positive thoughts. My mind was stress-free—although only for a few weeks—and I was able to produce a lot of work.

During my three years of exam preparation, I heard many stories about students’ journeys into their qualifying exams. Somehow knowing that we all go through the same process helped me calm down and stay more positive about this experience. While I had written many seminar papers and had presented at several conferences, the adrenaline of going through the qualifying exams was still there. Qualifying exams are different for every student and since day one in the Ph.D. program in NAS I knew that mine would be one of the biggest academic challenges I would encounter. I went through more than 40 drafts of qualifying exam statements and thesis prospectus and I remember that every time I submitted a new draft to my advisor, looking back at her answer caused a bit of anxiety. However, I also learned not to be afraid of challenging myself and improving my critical thinking and writing abilities.

Initially, I had expected this experience to be very painful. Nevertheless, as the date for my qualifying exams approached I thought about my academic journey and the difficulties I have encountered as a migrant from Michoacán, Mexico in the United States. Life is full of challenges and harsh times, and mine has not been an exception. Since I permanently moved to California many years ago, adapting to a culture that was, up to that point, completely unknown to me, always has been a difficult task. However, the unconditional love and support of my family towards my academic endeavors have been central in my determination to get ahead and better myself. In addition, the fact that my sister, also a Ph.D. student and now a Ph.D. Candidate in NAS, was also going through the same process also made me feel stronger. Although we are working on different projects, we spent many nights talking about the qualifying exams and the kind of questions we might get. We would discuss books together and come up with different ideas on how to respond to the various concerns and questions that may come up during the oral exams. During this time, a cousin of mine residing in Mexico was also preparing to take her professional exams in Pre-School Education by the National School of Education. Therefore, I knew I was not alone in this journey and there were people around me who supported me each time I felt discouraged.

I am deeply in debt to my qualifying exam committee for their support, care, and encouragement throughout the qualifying exams process. For that, I am absolutely grateful. Native American Studies faculty at UC Davis are keenly engaged and concerned about the work that their students do in a way that always make us go that extra mile in order to acknowledge that we are stronger than we think we are and capable of doing more. While I felt stressed out and anxious throughout the whole process, even during the written exams, at the moment I was welcomed into the orals, I felt empowered. I knew that every single professor that was sitting there believed in my capabilities and wanted me to do great. Now that I have an opportunity to reflect on my experience taking the qualifying exams, I must say that the overall process, including the reading, writing, and examination portions, was challenging, exhilarating, and enriching. It is a one-time academic experience and although it is not as enjoyable when we are sleep-deprived and have to spend many hours a day writing, re-writing, and reviewing an enormous amount of academic material, it definitely has made me a better thinker and writer.

In 2015 I was awarded a UC MEXUS Dissertation Research Grant to fund my fieldwork activities in Michoacán, Mexico, which I began in February of this year. This fellowship will allow me to start on the various activities that comprise my dissertation fieldwork research including visits to several archives and P’urhépecha communities in Michoacán. Since late January of this year I have been living in Michoacán, Mexico. I live in a very small rural community in the Lake Pátzcuaro region in central Michoacán. I grew up in this community and lived here until I was 15 years old and migrated to California. However, although moving into a different country was a difficult process, I learned to live in the new socio-cultural environment that California offered and became an independent migrant woman. Throughout these years, I have maintained constant communication with family and friends that stayed back home and travelled constantly to visit my community. However, coming back to my community to stay here for a permanent period of time has been quite an adventurous experience as I am re-learning things I had left behind. While thinking about writing a doctoral dissertation might be stressful sometimes, I am truly enjoying this opportunity. What has been one of the most exciting things for me is my reintegration into community life. I am so thankful to my family, friends, and community people in general in Huecorio, my hometown, for always receiving me and my parents with a warm welcome, which has made the transition into dissertation fieldwork research a much easier, rewarding, and enjoyable process. Over the past few months, I have met people who have always received me with a smile on their faces as I sit down and listen to the stories that they have to share.

Over the summer I have several projects, which I hope to accomplish. First, I applied to the UC Davis Social Justice Initiative Graduate Summer Research Fellowship to work on a project that mainly involves the recollection of oral perspectives and experiences regarding the implementation and effects of a recent state amendment that mandates the privatization of communal property, as well as the collaborative efforts and strategies indigenous people in Michoacán currently are employing to protect their lands. I also plan to spend one or two months of my summer visiting the National Agrarian Registry’s archives to continue working on my project on agrarian disputes and modes of legal resistance amongst P’urhépecha communities in Lake Pátzcuaro, which are very complex given the particular histories and internal socio-political and cultural dynamics of native communities in this region. Another project I plan to start working on, and which I am very committed to at a personal level, concerns the documentation of cargo celebrations in my community (these are local celebrations and fiestas, which are sponsored either individually or collectively, and which are destined to celebrate the saints in our communities), and track the cultural changes over the years as well as the sources of those transformations. My goal is to produce a documentary that would accompany the written material, especially since this is a work that would be done with the collaboration of community members and which I hope to donate to my community’s local library once it is accomplished. I hope that in a future blog I have the opportunity to comment on the progress of these projects.

I would like to conclude by saying that if I could describe this school year in one word it would be challenging. Nevertheless, both the achievements and experiences I have acquired throughout this year have made me a stronger and a more committed and passionate person towards the work that I do and my future career goals. Meeting new people and taking the time to listen to their difficult but yet inspiring stories as I am moving along this new academic journey have made my fieldwork dissertation research such an invaluable experience. As I think about the great and challenging moments I experienced this school year as well as my near future plans, I cannot be but fully charged of positivity and great energy for the projects and memories that lie ahead.

Back row (Left to Right): Brook Colley (PhD), Cutcha Risling Baldy (PhD), Kathy DeerInWater (PhD)
Front row (Left to Right): Hen Werner (MA), Gayle Totton (PhD), Sylvia Soto(PhD), Patricia Killelea (PhD)

Brook Colley (Wasco, Warm Springs, Eastern Cherokee) (Enrolled Eastern Cherokee) PhD in Native American Studies
Current/Future Position: Adjunct Instructor in Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University and Southern Oregon University as a visiting Professor in the Native Studies Department. In addition, she is working on a book project that investigates the emergency of the tribal casino economy and engages in a problem-solving approach to inter-tribal conflict in the tribal casino era. 

Kathy DeerInWater, PhD in Population Biology
Current/Future Position: I will be working for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society as the Director of Strategic Initiatives and Research 

Patricia Killelea, PhD in Native American Studies 
Current/Future Position: In addition to writing and publishing my poetry, beginning in Fall 2015 I'll be an Assistant Professor of English at Northern Michigan University, where I will teach Creative Writing and Native American Literature. 

Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa Karuk, Yurok, enrolled Hoopa Valley Tribe) PhD in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research 
Current/ Future Position: In Fall 2015 she will be an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University

Silvia Soto, PhD in Native American Studies 
Current Position: I will be a post-doctoral fellow in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in Fall 2015. 

Gayle Marie Totton, PhD in Geography/ Human Ecology with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies
Current/Future Position: Returning to my current position with the California Native American Heritage Commission

In response to a certain text or film being discussed in my NAS 5 class, I ask one pertinent question to the students: In what way would the text/film contribute to the struggles of Indigenous peoples, advance Indigenous peoples’ rights, and/or help them pursue the goals of decolonization? At the core of analyzing Native people’s literary work is Simon Ortiz’s notion of responsibility:

“[I]t is not the oral tradition as transmitted from ages past alone which is the inspiration and course for contemporary Indian literature. It is also because of the acknowledgement by Indian writers of a RESPONSIBILITY to advocate for their people’s self-government, sovereignty, and control of land and resources; and to look also at racism, political and economic oppression, sexism, supremacism, and the needless and wasteful exploitation of land and people, especially in the U.S., that Indian literature is developing a character of nationalism which indeed it should have.”

With this framework, I carry out my responsibility as NAS 5 instructor, inspiring students to see Native literature for what it is worth: an expression of Indigenous people’s integrity and intellectual sovereignty.

Despite the importance of these goals at the political, intellectual, and artistic levels, little was I aware that I would be touched by Native literature at the very profound personal and emotional level. Not that I was not touched by it personally, but it achieved that effect to the deep level when a personal experience struck me overwhelmingly in the very midst of teaching Native American literature in Fall Quarter 2014: the death of my beloved mother. I started teaching the Fall Quarter 2014 in early October, when in mid-October I heard that my mother had to be hospitalized after being found unable to rise from bed one morning. Her health kept declining ever since, and each of my nights afterward was filled with an earnest prayer, asking God to save her for I was not ready to see her go. My lifetime of being separated from her was much longer than the time I had spent being with her. Not that I abandoned her, but the pursuit of my education had taken me to places hundreds and even thousands of miles away from my homeland.

And her condition worsened every day. She was still able to speak with me on the phone the first days she was at the hospital. Then I saw a picture of her sent by my brother in November, and what I saw was heartbreaking: chapped (but more like charred) lips, blackened hands, a mouth that remained open, eyes that remained closed, and an entire body that was as stiff as a log. In the very last week of November, I received a call from my brother: “She had two [what were assumed to be her final] wishes: to see you [me], and to see me [him] being married.” I rushed home with my wife and 2-and-a-half-year-old son, taking flights that encompassed half of the world to see her, probably for the last time. Arriving at the hospital, what I see of my mother was much worse than what I had seen on the picture.  After taking care of her for almost three weeks, she passed away on December 22nd, 2014. I was the first person to discover that she had left all of us. I may have been the last person on earth she had seen on her deathbed, in her own home.

What I reflect on this experience of being with my dying mother and in the presence of her death is the empowerment and strengthening of soul I gained from reading and engaging with literature produced by Native authors. It was in the midst of reading each of my students’ introductory paragraphs and essay outlines that I found myself profoundly inspired and sustained by poems written by Native poets. This was the moment when I realized that what I had always engaged with intellectually and artistically could touch me at the deep emotional and spiritual level. I did rely on my prayers to find personal strength, but I know full well that I relied on these poems for powerful and meaningful sustenance at the moments of my mother’s illness and death. There were hours that I spent in the Reading Room at Shields Library when I had my mind genuinely exploring into the very essence of each poem, thinking how my students would develop a critical essay out of it, as well as finding myself carried away in (somehow) delightful meditation. Indeed, I coped with the possible and eventual death of my mother through engagement with these poems.

I was not able to determine what kind of grief I was dealing with. Deborah Miranda aptly expresses what I felt at the death of my mother: “Maybe all loses before this one are practice: / maybe all grief that comes after her death seems tame. / I wish I knew how to make dying simple, wish our mother’s last week were not constructed / of clear plastic tubing, IVs, oxygen hiss, / cough medicine, morphine patches, radiation tattoos, / the useless burn on her chest.” I wish my mother had not had to endure the acute diarrhea that made her reel in severe pain for hours after consuming even a very little morsel of liquid food given through a plastic tube that ran through the tunnel in her nose. I wish I had not had to change her diapers for almost every two hours and pour iodine and bandage on her constantly-bleeding buttocks. I wish I had not had to see her in crushing disappointment after she found out that, against her wish, she was not able to rise from the bed as cancer had put her legs in utter uselessness.  

After nights of fervent prayers, should I be angry with the Creator who had put my mother in such relentless agony that she almost could not handle? Should God be my enemy? Should I find strength in other places? It was at these moments of questioning that I was brought to Miranda’s words: “Each grief has its unique side. / Choose the one that appeals to you. / Go gently. / Your body needs the energy to repair the amputation. / Humor phantom pain.” Indeed, I had to find the unique side of my grief, since it was not the one I could understand by maintaining the same wish in the same regular prayers. Perhaps I needed to pray in a different way. Other ways may appeal to me more. I did need the energy to repair my life’s amputation after my mother’s departure. Was there humor in these moments of grief; what was my humor, or was it simply phantom and pain? Any worthy suggestion to handle grief in out-of-ordinary ways? Miranda continues, a few lines forward: “Read your grief like the daily newspaper: / headlines may have the information you need. / Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street.” I did not scream since silence spoke louder for me. I screamed when I was most silent. I should have probably kicked the door of my car, not to ease grief, but simply to do something different. But I did concur with reading my grief like the daily newspaper. Life is never divided between dead and life; my mother did not pass away but she passed on, entering a different realm of life that everyone will take. No need to think of heaven or hell.

I will think of a gathering in the Milky Way, a powwow at the very end of the world. Do I need to grieve in a time like this? Is death ever-powerful? No, said Sherman Alexie: “Crow rides a pale horse / into a crowded powwow / but none of the Indian panic. / Damn, says Crow, I guess / they already live near the end of the world.” In the face of death, I need not panic, just as Indian people in Alexie’s poem do not panic with the arrival of the crow riding on a pale horse. Death and destruction has lost its sting, and we are all already at the brink to the next world. In this case, death is a nonsense inculcated in our brain; fear is instilled by our enemy, the colonizers of the land and the soul. Sherman Alexie: “I am told by many / of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing / with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.” I was told by many that I should grieve, but I would grieve in a way that no one had ever done before. So I shall grieve distinctively when I am dancing with the spirits of the universe near the bridge where I see the gathering of dancers as they welcome the presence of my mother.

As Joy Harjo speaks to my mother: “You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking / from the encampment where my relatives make a feast of fresh / dear meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.” I envisioned a feast that my mother was invited to, where she would share the joy of a hearty meal with our relatives. Rather than an intersection of heaven and hell, she would encounter a gathering of beloved souls, a “kitchen table” defined by Harjo as the place where “the gifts of earth are brought and prepared. Set on the table. So it has been since / creation, and it will go on.” A welcome party would have been waiting for her, and she would be embraced by everyone: my late father and grandfather, my grandmother (her mother) who would no longer be insane, and her cousin who had been a faithful pastor his whole life. My vision is to join the feast with them one day, when death is nil as I pursue my way to the sought-after Milky Way. As I make my own map to the next world, I know that what I will encounter is “red cliffs,” which are “the heart / they contain the ladder.” Afterwards, “[a] white deer will greet [me] when the last human climbs from destruction,” and this white deer is a gift for everyone taking the journey to the next world, the fifth world for the new generation of Indigenous children, as well as a gift for anyone daring to leave behind a destructive (and destroyed) world, a world of pain and death, a world of, in Harjo’s observation, “paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.”

Our hand-crafted map will never be perfect, and our journey will always be tumultuous, but Miranda advises me in my grappling with grief: “Approach grief with determination. / Pretend the finish line doesn’t keep receding. / Lean into pain. / You can outrun it.” And yes, I was and am determined to approach grief with full tenacity. I will not run from it, nor can I outrun it. I will make my own map and read grief like the daily newspaper. Not that it is simple; it never is. But I will breathe it as I breathe fresh air every morning. It will be as fresh as my son’s little steps in the morning as he opens the door and says, in half drowsiness: “Good morning, Earth. I love you.”

I reminisce the dark brown earth as the diggers started to swing their hoes over my mother’s grave. She was returning to the earth that had nurtured her. She loved the people as she gave her life, her whole life, to sustain their hearts through her sermons and ministries. I imagine myself, as I read Esther Belin’s poem, being one of the diggers: “I dug into the earth. / The ground weakened beneath the strength I put into the shovel / pounding the ground / smooth and moist at first / then cold and solid.” I do that as I knew that my mother would fall into the embrace of the earth, not as an end, but as the beginning of a journey to a beautiful world. I exerted my strength in digging and covering the grave with dirt as an act of honor, the very last gift for a nurturing mother, a mother I always returned to whenever I wanted to hear the soft breeze of my homeland. As the grave was covered with the dark soil, I “felt her heat / tissue and blood and life / squatting with bloodied hands and cold earth / bringing [my mother] home.” I knew she was home in the brown earth, the everlasting peace. That was the beginning of the journey, at the end of which she would be presented with a feast and many gifts. There is never the end of the world, for what I believe she had seen, and I would see, is a place where, as Harjo describes, “we sing with joy, with sorrow. [Where] [w]e pray of suffering and remorse. We give / thanks.” We will not see flaming brimstones, the Apocalypse, but a table of dinner, of feast, “while we are laughing and crying, / eating of the last sweet bite.”

In the aftermath of destruction, of grief, we will not encounter an absolute demise of everything; instead, we will find beauty in its most fragile but enchanting forms: “the seeds to plant and the babies / who needed milk and comforting, and someone / picked up a guitar and ukulele from the rubble / and began to sing about the light flutter / the kick beneath the skin of the earth / we left there / beneath us. / a warm animal / a song being born between the legs of her / a poem” (Harjo). I heard that song in the last seconds of my mother’s funeral; I recognized as the light flutter the ruffle of the graveyard’s leaves in the afternoon as rainclouds were gathering, and I left under the brown earth the body of my mother whose spirit was indeed like a warm animal, as I heard her singing the song to the next world. While she continued to sing, I had a new poem being etched right in the soft spot at the center of my memory. Luci Tapahonso makes an appeal: “Hector, light a candle for me,” in times of trial and suffering; in the same manner, I light a candle every time memories hit me as I look at my mother’s picture on the wall, a photograph captured during my brother’s engagement ceremony. To be present in his engagement day, she had to walk with pain in her legs due to bone cancer, and yet, she showed a happy face. I should thank the camera, for it was because of standing before it that she had no choice but to smile despite the pain. She smiled because my brother was engaged, and soon he was to be married.

She was indeed present in his wedding ceremony, held in an emergency fashion in the hospital where she was being treated, less than two months after his engagement. She was the only person present that had to lie on her bed, assisted by nurses and the oxygen equipment, with every guest having to cover their faces with masks for fear of adding more viruses to my mother’s already frail body. So, I light a candle in recollection of those memories. I light a candle every time I hear her scream her loudest screams to God to release her from the unbearable pain a few hours before she died. I was informed that for a person with cancer, every cell in their body explodes right before they die, and I guess that was what happened as she shouted her last cries in that room: God, help me! I can’t take the pain anymore!”  

I believe I have to “[r]evel in contradiction,” as Miranda consoles me. I believe in the words of Wendy Rose: “falling is not / falling but / offering.” I see my mother’s death as an offering that enables me to see death in a good way. I see her not as ending but as continuing, as embracing what awaits everyone of us at the end of our journey. At the verge of my life’s end on this world, I will be dreaming of a table, a kitchen table, a gathering of food and people, a reunion of beloved relatives. I will see all my relations, all my relatives, as I believe my mother has encountered by now.

The teaching of Introduction to Native American Literature has given me the opportunity to engage with the political, intellectual, artistic, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of Indigenous people’s lives as well as my personal life in a significant way. In the event of my mother’s death, it has taught me, in both profound and unique manners, how to cope with death in a good way. I see the journey in front of me as a journey of life and hope. What I need is a song, a song sung by Deborah Miranda at the death of her father: “I need a song like a hurricane, / spiraled winds of chaos, / a snake-charming song, / a bullshit-busting song, / a shut-up-and-listen-to-the-Creator song. / I need a song that rears its head up like a granite peak / and greets the eastern sky.”

Poems incorporated (in no particular order):

1. Joy Harjo’s “A Map to the Next World”
2. Deborah Miranda’s “Our Lady of Perpetual Loss”
3. Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
4. Deborah Miranda’s “Advice from La Llorona”
5. Luci Tapahonso’s “Light a Candle”
6. Esther Belin’s “Bringing Hannah Home”
7. Wendy Rose’s “Buckeye as You Are”
8. Deborah Miranda’s “The Ghost Road Song”
9. Sherman Alexie’s “Crow Testament”
10. Sherman Alexie’s “The Powwow at the End of the World”

Keynote Luncheon: April 24, 2015 from 12:00-1:20pm (MU II at UC Davis Memorial Union)

I was born in my ancestral Jalquin Ohlone homeland. Strongly aware and proud of my Ohlone identity, I work to educate others of a continuous Ohlone presence and to dispel negative stereotypes of my people. While living in two worlds, both contemporary and traditional, I strive to bring Ohlone culture into the modern era in multiple ways, including working diligently to reawaken my native Chochenyo Ohlone language, and I am seeing meaningful success. In the last year, I have been a language teacher in my community as part of a multigenerational effort to bring our language back home. I work at Mission Dolores in San Francisco, where I have developed a fair, honest portrayal of the effects of the Missions on Ohlone people and the cultural resistance that came with that, straying away from misconceptions and lies to focus on a truthful story of Indian experiences during the Mission period. I serve on the Board of Directors for the Advocates of Indigenous California Language Survival, a statewide organization that aims to foster the restoration and revitalization of California Indian languages, and I was recently brought on to Yocha Dehe’s Living Language Circle Board, which connects teachers of California Indian languages together. To outreach to the broader community, I work at Heyday Books, a publishing company that has produced several books by and about Ohlones and other California Indians, such asThe Ohlone Way, and the magazine News from Native California. In my spare time, I share my personal experiences through social media on my blog Being Ohlone in the 21st Century.


TO REGISTER FOR THE SYMPOSIUM AND ATTEND THE LUNCHEON CLICK HERE.

Learn more about the 2015 symposium and see the full schedule here.

Keynote Luncheon: April 23, 2015 from 12:00-1:20pm (MU II at UC Davis Memorial Union)

Amy Lonetree is an enrolled citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation and an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. Her scholarly research focuses on Indigenous history, visual culture studies, and museum studies, and she has received fellowships in support of this work from the School for Advanced Research, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Her publications include, Decolonizing Museums:  Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012); a co-edited book with Amanda J. Cobb, The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and a co-authored volume, People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1942 (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011).She is currently working on two new projects.  The first is a visual history of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin drawing upon two historic photography collections, and the second is a historical study documenting the adoption of Indigenous children throughout the twentieth century.

TO REGISTER FOR THE SYMPOSIUM AND ATTEND THE LUNCHEON CLICK HERE.

Learn more about the 2015 symposium and see the full schedule here.

Name: Cutcha Risling Baldy
Tribal Affiliation: Hoopa Valley Tribe (Yurok, Karuk)
Associate Instructor for NAS 5- Introduction to Native American Literature
cutchabaldy.weebly.com 

Title of your dissertation: no:'olchwin-ding, no:'olchwin-te (To Grow Old In A Good Way): The Revitalization of the Hupa Women’s Coming Of Age Ceremony

Conference Presentations (Fall 2013- Spring 2014)

Native American Indigenous Studies Association Conference (Austin, TX)
ch'ilwa:l wint'e (They are beating time/ A Flower Dance is being held... always): The Hupa Women's Coming of Age Ceremony and re-writing/re-righting the historical narrative

Women of Color Conference (Davis, CA)
Native American Women and Leadership Panel: The Hupa Women's Flower Dance

3rd Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium (Davis, CA)
tim-na'me (At the Lucky Spot She Bathes): The Hupa Woman's Flower Dance & Re-Writing/ Re-righting how we talk about Indigenous menstrual beliefs and women's coming of age. 

National Ethnic Studies Annual Conference (Oakland, CA) 
Engaging Research Justice through Native American Studies 

Good Native Governance: Innovative Research in Law, Education and Economic Development Conference (LosAng, CA)
Criminalizing Tradition in Native California (Poster Presentation)

Social Science History Association Conference (Chicago, IL)
Criminalizing Tradition in Native California (Poster Presentation) 

California Indian Conference (Sacramento, CA)
Woven With Our Roots: A historical and contemporary discussion on the revitalization of basket weaving in Native California

Publications (Fall 2013- Spring 2014)

• Baldy, Cutcha Risling. "Why we gather: traditional gathering in native Northwest California and the future of bio-cultural sovereignty." Ecological Processes 2.1 (2013): 17. [Peer Reviewed]
• The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King (Review), The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Forthcoming by: Cutcha Risling Baldy
  
  

Awards Received (Fall 2013- Spring 2014) 

• Honorable Mention: Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
• Honorable Mention: 2014-2015 Ford Dissertation Fellowship
• UC Davis Block Grant Award for Dissertation Research
• Professors for the Future Fellowship
             -Project: How I Would Teach It: Graduate Students Teaching Texts
             -Co Editor: Native American Studies Graduate Research Journal

Projects Completed (Fall 2013 - Spring 2014) 

Professors for the Future Program- Establishing the Native American Studies Graduate Research Journal with my co-editor Angel and our editorial board: http://nasgradjournal.weebly.com/

Planned and Organized  Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Association (25 Years Later) Symposium at the University of California - Davis.

Life's Accomplishments! 

This years I was honored to be invited as a keynote speaker at several events about my dissertation research. It reiterated for me how my research speaks to Native communities as they continue to heal from colonization and re-balance their communities. 

• Native Women’s Wellness Gathering: Healing through Hope and Balance (Tuolumne, CA) Keynote Speaker: The Hupa Flower Dance Ceremony
• Native American Week at Sacramento State University  wung-xowidilk- A Flower Dance Story: Native Women, California Indian History and the Hupa Women's Coming of Age Ceremony 
• Reclaiming Our Strengths, Reclaiming Our Practices Webinar Series (Sacramento, CA) no'olchwin-ding, no:'olchwinte (To Grow Old In A Good Way): The Revitalization of the Hupa Women's Coming of Age Ceremony 

My daughter finished First Grade! and traveled with me to several presentations where she took copious notes and was a very good audience member. I also continued work as the Executive Director of the Native Women's Collective. We did several Flower Dance song demonstrations throughout California. 

Finally - I continued to post about Native American Studies and contemporary issues on my blog. I was proud that many of my posts were re-posted and published by national news sources.

What are you going to do this summer?

This summer I am writing, writing, writing. Next year will be my final year in Graduate School and I am looking forward to finishing my dissertation. 

I will also be working as a Graduate Research Assistant on the Hupa Language Dictionary run by Professor Justin Spence. You can find it here! http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hupa/hupa-lexicon.html

Stephanie Lumsden
Hoopa Valley Tribe
stephanielumsden.weebly.com
TA for Introduction to Native American Studies Fall 2013
Graduated MA program in Native American Studies
Master's Thesis: "Native Americans and the Prison-Industrial Complex in California"

Conference Presentations (Fall 2013- Spring 2014)

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2014, University of Texas, Austin                   May 2014
Reproductive Justice, Sovereignty, and Incarceration as part of the panel titled, Incarceration and Education: The Limitations and Possibilities of Working Within the Confines Set by Colonialism – Panel Presentation

The 3rd Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium, Dreaming to Knowledge:
Acorn Eaters in Transnational Waters (Davis, CA)                                                     April 2014
Traditional Jurisprudence, Restorative Justice, and Tribal Courts: Reimagining Justice for Tribal Sovereignty

Good Native Governance: Innovative Research in Law, Education, and Economic Development
(Los Angeles, CA)                                                                                                       March 2014
Criminalizing Tradition in Native California – Partnered Poster Presentation

Social Sciences History Association 2013 Conference (Chicago, IL)                         November 2013
Criminalizing Tradition in Native California – Partnered Poster Presentation

Social Sciences History Association 2013 Conference (Chicago, IL)                         November 2013
Native Americans and Incarceration in California

Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1998) 25 Years Later   November 2013
Criminalizing Tradition in Native California

28th Annual California Indian Conference and Gathering (Sacramento, CA)               October 2013
Woven With Our Roots: A Historical and Contemporary Discussion on the Revitalization of Basket Weaving in Native California – Group Presentation

Critical Ethnic Studies Conference (Chicago, IL)                                                           September 2013
Colonization, the Law, and Indigenous Criminality in California

Life Accomplishments:

Stephanie has moved to Portland, Oregon and will start her teaching career at Portland State University in Winter 2015. This summer Stephanie will be volunteering at the Native American Youth & Family Center in Portland.

Name: Angel M. Hinzo
Tribal Affiliation: Winnebago/Ho-Chunk
Associate Instructor for NAS 5- Introduction to Native American Literature; GSR for the DE in Feminist Theory and Research; NAS Graduate Student Representative

Title of your dissertation: Voicing Across Space: Subverting Colonial Structures in Ho-Chunk/Winnebago Tribal History

Conference Presentations (Fall 2013- Spring 2014)

• 2014 4th Annual DE in Feminist Theory and Research Graduate Symposium, UC Davis; The Pedagogical Value of Native American Women’s Literature to Historical Theory.
• 2014: 2nd Annual Women of Color Conference, UC Davis; Honoring Native American Women Leaders and Veterans.
• 2014 3rd Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium, UC Davis; “White people would say this was impossible”: Decolonizing Western Narratives through Oral Histories and Cosmologies.
• 2014 Annual National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference; Engaging Research Justice through Native American Studies.
  

Awards Received (Fall 2013- Spring 2014) 

• 2014-2015 Graduate Student Assistant to the Dean and to the Chancellor, UC Davis
• 2014-2015 UC Provost’s Dissertation Year Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (declined)
• 2014 Social Justice Initiative Fellowship, UC Davis
• Honorable Mention: 2014-2015 Ford Dissertation Fellowship
• UC Davis Block Grant Award for Dissertation Research

Projects Completed (Fall 2013 - Spring 2014) 

Professors for the Future Program- Establishing the Native American Studies Graduate Research Journal with my co-editor Cutcha and our editorial board: http://nasgradjournal.weebly.com/

Life's Accomplishments! 

I’m happy to have survived another year of graduate school and to have a plan for finishing my program. The end is near!

I am also grateful that I was able to sharpen some of my presentation skills, gain more experience with interviews, and with organizing by being a part of the NAS Graduate Student Symposium Committee and the DE in Feminist Theory and Research Graduate Symposium Committee.

Other things from this year include fiddling with my animation software and showing those animations to people. I finished all co-op campaigns in Halo 4, Left 4 Dead, and I’m almost finished with Batman Arkham Asylum and Left 4 Dead 2. I completed some beading projects: my first medallion, a pin, and two pouches. This year, I also received my driver’s license. That’s a life accomplishment. In the Game of Life your token starts off being able to drive already…that does not reflect reality.

What are you going to do this summer?

This summer I’m planning on traveling and completing dissertation research in the Midwest. I will be completing more archival research in Wisconsin and returning for the second time to the Kansas City National Archives. I will also be visiting my sister and her family for the birth of my second nephew. One of my summer goals is also to make serious progress on my dissertation by starting a writing regimen. I also will make sure I balance my work with making time to bead, draw, play videogames, and watch movies. It will be an exciting and busy summer.

I will be back in Davis in September to help coordinate the UC Davis Week of Welcome for graduate students as the 2014-2015 Graduate Student Assistant to the Dean and to the Chancellor.

Name: Bayu Kristianto                    
Associate Instructor (NAS 5)
Title of your dissertation: The notion of the body as a decolonization strategy in the novels of Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich

Conference Presentations (Fall 2013- Spring 2014)

1) “Building Frameworks for Social Justice” at Ethnic Studies Conference, Mills College, April 2014 (with other students from Professor Susy Zepeda’s seminar Critical Feminist Methodologies: Building Frameworks for Social Justice in Fall 2013)

2) “Activism and Decolonization through Literature: The Case of Native American Literatures” at the 3rd Annual Native American Studies Graduate Students Conference, held at UC Davis, April 2014.

Awards Received (Fall 2013- Spring 2014) 

• Associate Instructor Award for 2013-2014
• Block Grant to work on dissertation during Summer 2014
  

Life's Accomplishments

I finished taking seminars in Winter 2014. Starting from Spring 2014, my focus is on reading and conducting research for my dissertation, in addition to teaching NAS 5.

What are you going to do this summer?

Upon receiving Block Grant for Summer 2014, I will focus entirely on completing the reading for my dissertation and working on the chapter on theoretical framework. Hopefully, I will also be able to write the first chapter on analysis.

by: Bayley Marquez
UC Berkeley

It was such an honor to present a paper at the 3rd Annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium - Dreaming to Knowledge: Acorn Eaters in Transnational Waters. It was a wonderful opportunity to engage with scholars throughout the University of California system around a wide variety of topics that centered the ideas of decolonization as well as varied epistemic and ontological approaches to studying issues facing Native people.

I was particularly excited to see the variety of papers presented at the symposium. I loved seeing the various articulations of the diverse locations Native people occupy and the wide-range of ways Indianness is enacted in these different spaces. In Mishauna Goeman’s keynote presentation I learned about the co-constitutive settler states of Canada and the U.S. and how Native peoples cross and interrogate these states and borders.  I found similar themes in the presentations by Katie Keliiaa on Native women being employed as domestic workers in the Bay area and Brian Clearwater’s presentation on Native spiritual networks in urban locals. I was struck by the way, in each of these discussions; Native people were not constrained by place, but enacted agency across place and time. The presentations across both days of the symposium addressed a wide variety of topics, but the questions and discussions they generated across disciplines, campuses, and programs demonstrated the ways that all of our work has intersections.

I am incredibly thankful to the planning committee Angel Hinzo, Vanessa Equivido, Sandra Gutierrez, Cutcha Risling Baldy, Cuauhtemoc Lule, Rebecca Figueroa, and Bayu Kristianto for putting this event together. Events like this are so important for us as graduate students to make connections across fields and programs. It also provides a supportive space among other young scholars to share our work. I have presented papers at other conferences in my field and I found that presenting at this symposium was such and overwhelmingly positive experience that I deeply valued.

My presentation was titled The Settler Colonial Schooling Dialectic: Native American and African American Education in Counterpoint and focused on a close examination of the interconnections between Black vocational schooling in the south, particularly the Hampton Institute, and the development of Indian Boarding schools. I used this examination to theorize the underlying mechanisms of assimilation and othering that create the settler colonial school system. I recently presented a portion of this paper at the American Educational Research Association Annual conference and I plan to use the theoretical framework crafted in this paper to inform my current work with Native students going to school in Oakland. 

Bayley Marquez member of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and is a second year doctoral student in Social and Cultural Studies in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkley. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University. Her research examines the colonial processes of schooling, the intersections between Native American and African American Education, and the schooling experiences of Urban Native youth in the Bay Area. Her research is informed by her teaching experience on the Navajo Nation, as well as work with youth in East Palo Alto and other low income communities in the Bay Area. 

I write with gratitude to the graduate students of UC Davis’ Native American Studies Department who planned the Symposium “Dreaming to Knowledge: Acorn Eaters in Transnational Waters” held at UC Davis April 17th and 18th. Davis’ third annual Native American Studies Graduate Student Symposium hosted more than thirty presentations from students representing six UC schools (Davis, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Diego, and Los Angeles).  The planning committee (Vanessa Esquivido, Rebecca Figueroa, Sandra Gutierrez, Angel Hinzo, Bayu Kristianto, Cuauhtemoc Lule, Stephanie Lumsden, and Cutcha Risling Baldy) structured the conference in such a way that although presenters came from diverse departments and programs, clear themes emerged in each panel and across all sessions. 

One such vital theme was the importance of indigenous knowledges in a context where western epistemology often reenacts the violence it made possible in the first place.  For instance, on the first panel, Vanessa Esquivido explained that her tribe had to resort to racist 19th- century newspapers reporting on massacres of Native people to attempt to fulfill present day criteria of Federal Recognition.  The conference and its presenters asserted that knowledge exists and can be gathered among tribal groups and traditions as suggested by the words “it’s a good day to gather knowledge” in the Symposium’s art contributed by Professor Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Taskigi/ Diné).

Indigenous knowledges provide constructive alternatives to the problems caused and perpetuated by nation-states.  Stephanie Lumsden’s critique of the prison industrial complex in the United States argued that her tribe, the Hupa, lived together for centuries without ever putting a human in a cage.  Significantly, Indigenous ways of knowing not only offer more restorative paradigms for justice, but also for maintaining balanced communities.  In her presentation, Cutcha Risling Baldy corrected much flawed anthropological studies that sought to inscribe western taboos onto Native traditions and showed how the initiation ceremonies of the Hupa people provide ways of valuing women.  Yvonne Sherwood discussed how conflicting epistemologies can play out in academia and made incisive arguments for the value of experiential knowledge shared through story.

UCLA Professor Mishuana Goeman, whose teaching and 2013 book Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations provided the inspiring spark for many presenters, delivered Friday’s keynote lecture that spoke to the value and necessity of indigenous knowledge.  Her talk “Routed Stories and Native Geographies: Land Water and Body” encouraged us to consider the ways terminology frames and limits, cordons-off, our thinking.  The word “transnational” itself assumes the existence of drawn boundaries and implies the legitimacy of nation-states in a way that posits land as disaggregated and divided.  Rather, Goeman challenged us to think of land and water as connected emphasizing Chadwick Allen’s term “Trans-Indigeneity.” Goeman pointed out that this theoretical perspective should not seek to paint all tribes and Native people as the same, but rather should emphasize the interconnectedness among diverse and specific Native groups.  Goeman, a scholar of literature as well as politics, explained that stories, rooted in land and history, are also routed in that they connect different peoples of different places and traditions.  Goeman argued that looking at the world with this acknowledgement of connectedness transcends the fragmentation demanded by nation-states and provides essential grounds for resurgence.  Taken together, the conference, talks, and gathering worked towards Goeman’s vision of uniting through leaning about difference and forging coalition through profound acts of sharing of stories. 

Professor Steve Crum, the chair of Native American Studies at UC Davis, opened both days of the conference with remarks about his own research and the importance of Native scholars in academia and he concluded each opening address with songs.  Keynote speakers Victorio Shaw and Mishuana Goeman modeled what Native scholars can do in and out of the academy. After earning his law degree from UC Davis, King Hall, Shaw dedicated himself to serving tribes and Native peoples.  In his Thursday keynote speech, he shared a moving story about how, in his path towards this vocation, he turned obstacles into switchbacks, so he could continue climbing. 

The program not only featured exciting scholarship from diverse places and disciplines but also emphasized and incorporated artistic work.  The banquet and creative hour featured the talented animation of Angel Hinzo, a reading from a soon to be published collection of short stories by Cutcha Risling Baldy, poignant recordings and photography by Vanessa Esquivdo, and an interactive map by Wayne Marci.

The planning committee did an excellent job not only of organizing a conference where graduate students could feel comfortable presenting and sharing our projects but also of setting a professional and inspiriting tone for a field, that because of scholars like these, will grow and flourish.

Corinne Bancroft is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara.  Bancroft’s work focuses on the role of narrative in contemporary politics—especially in the ways in which it creates exclusive boundaries of nationhood and nationality.  Bancroft has worked with No Más Muertes (No More Deaths) for seven years walking migrant trails with water on the southern border between Arizona and Mexico.  Bancroft has published in the Journal of Cognitive Semiotics about the rhetoric of border narratives and has delivered papers on the subject of the border wall.  She is currently examining the ways in which Native literatures assert types of tribal sovereignty to make interventions in U.S. law. 

Photos courtesy of NAS Graduate Student Bayu Kristianto! Thank you Bayu!

By: Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa), M.A. Native American Studies 

The wait is almost over; this year’s annual Native American Graduate Student Symposium is just two weeks away! The title and theme for the symposium this year is Dreaming to Knowledge: Acorn Eaters in Transnational Waters. This theme was selected by our symposium committee because of how it emphasizes Native epistemologies, transnational dialogue, and California Indian peoples. Since this is our first symposium that is open to the entire UC system, we are more excited than ever to hear the multiplicity of voices doing research concerning Indigenous peoples in California and beyond.

The first annual Native American Graduate Student Symposium in 2012, Engaging the Indigenous Americas, was open to all graduate students at UC Davis whose research focused on Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The goal of this symposium was to begin a dialogue about Indigenous studies amongst graduate students on our campus and to allow the interdisciplinary nature of our department to shine. Our first symposium was a total success thanks to the generous support of many campus institutions and the enthusiastic participation of UC Davis graduate students. We were so encouraged by the turnout for our first symposium that for our second annual symposium, Weaving the Roots of Knowledge, we opened the call for papers to the UC Berkeley graduate students and extended it to a two-day event. Again, the focus of this symposium was bringing together graduate student scholars whose work centers Indigenous issues but this time with an emphasis on how knowledge and methodologies are woven together in and outside of the academy. Our second symposium was another amazing success with support from both campuses, awesome participation, and great questions from the audience.

Since we have gotten such an incredible response during our first two symposium events, this year our committee decided to open the call for papers to the entire UC system, have a two-day event, and extend an invitation for participation to UC Davis undergraduates as well. We have an exciting schedule lined up and the committee has worked hard to create dynamic panels that are sure to stimulate great discussions. The topics that this symposium will cover vary widely and include Native literature, Indigenous philosophy, Federal Indian Law, strategies for decolonization, Indigenous identity, and Indigenous language revitalization. These topics will be presented as individual papers, roundtable discussions, and partnered presentations. We are also looking forward to our two vibrant keynote speakers, Victorio Shaw and Mishuana Goeman. We hope that many members of the community take advantage of the opportunity to see all the great research that is going to be presented at our unique symposium. Supporting the Native American Graduate Student Symposium is important because it provides a space that is committed to the expansion and rigorous discussion of where the Native American Studies discipline is heading and how research about Indigenous peoples should be done. Please come and enjoy our event and help us make the 3rd annual NAS graduate student symposium another awesome success!

Visit the symposium page for schedule and more information!

Thank you to our sponsors! 

Native American Studies (UC Davis)
Office of the President (UC) 
Dean of Humanities and Dean of Social Sciences (UC Davis)
Vice Provost Ralph Hexter (UC Davis)
Dean Gibeling, Graduate Studies (UC Davis)
Native American Faculty Staff Association (UC Davis)
Cross Cultural Center (UC Davis)
Women's Resources and Research Center (UC Davis)
Graduate Student Association (UC Davis)
Student Recruitment and Retention Center (UC Davis)
Dean of Anthropology (UC Santa Cruz)
Dean of Literature (UC Santa Cruz)
Ethnic Studies (UC Riverside)
Dean of Humanities (UCLA)

Keynote Luncheon: Routed Stories and Native geographies: Land, Water and Body -- Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Gender Studies Department, UCLA

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Gender Studies Department 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 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. Currently she is also part of a grant on Mapping Indigenous L.A. that is working toward creating a community oriented mobile application that decolonizes the LA landscape. Mishuana Goeman provides feminist interventions into an analysis of colonial spatial restructuring of Native lands and bodies in the twentieth century. Through an examination of the ways that Native women’s art, film, poetry and prose reveal settler colonialism in North America as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, she continually ask how rigid spatial categories, such as nations, borders, reservations, and urban areas are formed by settler nation-states structuring of space. 

TO REGISTER FOR THE SYMPOSIUM AND ATTEND THE LUNCHEON CLICK HERE

Learn more about the symposium and see the full schedule here.

12:00-1:20pm (MU-II at UC Davis Memorial Union)
Keynote Luncheon: Victorio Shaw (Hoopa Valley Tribe), Attorney at Law

Victorio graduated UC Davis - King Hall law school in May of 2011, and passed the California Bar Exam the same summer.  Victorio was admitted to the Bar in December of 2011 and immediately began practicing law as a salaried attorney in Sacramento.  He now practices law in Sonoma County, CA.  Since founding the Law Office of Victorio L Shaw, Victorio has been dedicated to serving Native American families, individuals, tribes, and organizations; as well as artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs. While at King Hall, Victorio concentrated on Federal Indian law, Entertainment law, Civil Rights, and Family law.  Victorio also served as  President of the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA),  member of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), The Sports and Entertainment Law Club, and as an active participant in the Know Your Rights Club.


TO REGISTER FOR THE SYMPOSIUM AND ATTEND THE LUNCHEON CLICK HERE

http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/the_ahwahneechees/chapter_3.html#page_25

The Ahwahneechees: A Story of the Yosemite Indians (1966) by John W. Bingaman

CHAPTER III
BIOGRAPHIES OF INDIANS PAST AND PRESENT

MAGGIE "TABUCE" HOWARD

Born in 1870, near Bridgeport, California, a Piute. Her father was Joaquin Sam, or Kosana. Maggie lived near Bridgeport until her mother died, then went to live with her father near Mono Lake. Her family made many trips over the mountains to Yosemite to gather acorns, and trade with the Yosemites.

At Mono Lake they collected the pupa of a certain fly which breeds on the shores of Mono Lake. With this Ka-cha-vee and acorns they lived well.

On one trip crossing the mountains her father’s horse was frightened, and threw him on a rock. Some Indians picked him up and brought him to Yosemite Valley. They thought he was dead. The story of "Kosana" as it was told, is that late in the fall of 1875, a small group of Indians from the Mono Lake Country had crossed the Sierra, to gather acorns. When they had finished, they started their return trip over the high pass, but were forced to turn back because of a heavy snow storm. Among this group was an old man named Kosana, a medicine man, more than 80 years old, and not strong. He died after the exposure and the strenuous trip into the Valley. His followers set up camp near the site of the present park museum where they built their u-ma-cha, with canvas and long slabs of incense cedar bark.

Some white men made a fine coffin for the deceased Kosana, he was buried just south of the large rock that is seen near the southeast corner of the Yosemite Museum.

Kosana had a young daughter at the time of his death, who was none other than "Ta-bu-ce" or Maggie, as she was known by her many friends in later years. Ta-bu-ce is an Indian name meaning "grass nut" the name her mother gave her.

Maggie had three husbands: first was Jack Lundy, second Billy Williams, and third Dan Howard. She had two sons: Willie Mike Williams, and Simon Slim Lundy.

After Maggie was married, she and her oldest son William, her sister’s daughter May Tom, age 14, and some others went up the Yosemite Falls trail, and camped somewhere in the upper Indian Canyon. This was after an Indian Festival. Maggie, after much dancing, was tired and went to sleep early. A high wind storm came up and blew down a large pine tree. Her niece May Tom was killed by this fallen tree. Maggie had her collar bone broken, her ankles and feet badly injured, and the bones in her right leg fractured. Her sister took her daughter to the Valley, and left Maggie for dead beneath the tree all night. The next day Charlie Dick and other Indians came for her. She doesn’t remember what happened during that long night. A doctor in the Valley set the bones. All summer she lay in a cast, barely able to move her right hand to shoo away the flies. In the fall she was able to walk a little. She never fully recovered from this, always walking with a decided limp.

Maggie lived many years in Yosemite Valley, and was well known by many park visitors; for some years she was employed by the park museum to give demonstrations, making acorn meal and mush. She made many "Hikis," baskets, and sold them to visitors.
Death came to her January 25, 1947, and she was buried at Bishop, California, Too much snow at Mono Lake prevented the burial there, her preferred resting place. 

We are always updating our Current Student bios. You can check them out on our page: http://ucdnasgrads.weebly.com/current-students.html

Our grad students are usually up to something. Here is the latest update from PhD Candidate Christine Willie who is currently a faculty member at Diné  College in Tsaile, Arizona and also finishing her dissertation!

Yá’át’ééh shik’éí. Shí éí Christine Willie yinishyé. Dóone’é nishlínígíí éí Bilagáana nishlí, Kinyaa’áanii báshíshchíín, Bilgáana dashicheii, Tséníjíkiní dashinálí. Tsehilidi shighaan. Ahé´hee.  Hello! My name is Christine Willie and I am Italian and Navajo. As a faculty member of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, I teach Anthropology, History, and Indigenous Research Methodologies and Methods. I hold a B.A. in Spanish and Foreign Language Education (Rowan University) and a M.A. in Latin American Literature (University of Maryland, College Park). Currently, I am a doctoral candidate in Native American Studies (UCDavis). I am also a recipient of the 2013-2014 Mellon Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship. My fieldwork and research investigates the nuances and variations of traditional butchering of sheep in various locales of the Navajo Nation. These similarities and dissimilarities also correspond with the various approaches to inherent Diné decolonizing practices, which I analyze throughout my dissertation, tentatively titled “Sheep Is Life and Diné Decolonization”.

Read more about our students here: http://ucdnasgrads.weebly.com/current-students.html