The Second Annual Alfred A. Cave Lecture in Native American Studies: Boarding Schools and American Indian Dispossession
Professor Brenda J. Child
Monday, March 4, 2024
Government boarding schools went hand in hand with the American Indian land dispossession policies of the United States. Professor Child’s grandparents were among the thousands who attended the schools. She draws on her own family story to humanize the broader history of segregated Indian education.
Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. In 2021, she was the University of Minnesota’s recipient of the President’s Community Engaged Scholar Award, and in 2023 was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Professor Child is the author of several award-winning books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940; Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community; and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation. The latter won the American Indian Book Award. Her new book project is The Marriage Blanket: Love, Violence, and the Law in Indian Country. She has a popular documentary, Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World: Ojibwe People and Pandemics. She also authored a bilingual book for children, Bowwow Powwow, winner of the American Indian Youth Literature Medal. Professor Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota and is part of a committee developing a new constitution for the 15,000-member nation.
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The Inaugural Alfred A. Cave Lecture in Native American Studies: The Land Beneath Our Feet: Indian Removal, Crimes of State, and Public Memory
Professor Claudio Saunt
Monday, April 17, 2023
In the 1830s, the United States carried out one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations of the modern era. Claudio Saunt will describe how the United States expelled eighty thousand Native Americans from their homelands and explore how online mapping can reinscribe their presence on the land.
Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History, Regents’ Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. He has written four books that explore Indigenous histories across North America. His most recent book, Unworthy Republic (2020), was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.
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A Conversation with Chief Afukaka: Indigenous Peoples and Partnerships in the Brazilian Amazon
February 15, 2023, 3:00 pm, Smathers 100
UF American Indian and Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology invite you to a public conversation with Chief Afukaka Kuikuro, Paramount Chief of the Kuikuro Nation in the Territorio Indigena do Xingu in central Brazil. Chief Afukaka and his heirs will discuss their views on collaborations with archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other scientists over the past three decades, and the hope that continuing partnerships will inform solutions for the pressing problems of their community: deforestation, ecosystem degradation, catastrophic drought and wildfires, water pollution, and public health.
Chief Afukaka’s oration will be in Kuikuro and Portuguese, translated by Kalutata and Amuneri Kuikuro, his son and grandson, and Portuguese, translated by Helena Lima (Museu Goeldi).
The conversation with Chief Afukaka is preceded by a short introduction by UF Anthropology Professor Michael Heckenberger on collaborative projects over 30 years, partnered with Brazilian collaborators from the Museu Nacional (Rio), the Museu Goeldi (Belem) and the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (USão Paulo). This deeply engaged research collaboration brings to light many of the past cultural achievements of Indigenous Amazonian peoples, challenging the widely held view of pristine nature and primitive societies, and the resilience of descendant communities. Dr. Helena Lima will provide an overview of new directions in this collaborative project, particularly considering recent changes in Brazil under President Lula.
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Indigeneity: An Historical Reflection on a Very European Idea
Lecture by Dr. Judith Friedlander
Thursday, February 9, 2023, 4-6 pm, Smathers 100
The Role of Institutions for Academic Freedom and Human Rights
Lunch conversation with Dr. Judith Friedlander
Friday, February 10, 2023, 12-2 pm, Friends of Music Room, University Auditorium
Dr. Judith Friedlander is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has written extensively on questions of ethnic identity among Indigenous peasants in Mexico and Jewish intellectuals in France and the United States. Among her publications are Being Indian in Hueyapan, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968, and A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile. Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Dr. Friedlander amassed extensive experience in leadership at institutions of higher education. In addition to occupying the Eberstadt Chair in Anthropology, she served as an academic dean of the New School for Social Research, SUNY Purchase and Hunter College. She has also worked as a special advisor to the provost and president of Hunter College on a number of new academic initatives, including the creation of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. She is a frequent collaborator with The New University in Exile Consortium.
click here for flier for the event
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Since its inception, AIIS has developed the following programming:
Native Heritage month speaker series (since 2008)
- 2008: Winona La Duke “Native Americans and Sustainable Development”;
- 2011: International Conference on “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Plants and Religion”, featuring several panels on indigenous use of plants in ceremonies;
- 2012: Troy Wayne Poteete (Chief Justice of Cherokee Supreme Court) “Fraudulent Identities”, and panel discussion by Cherokee Satellite Community representatives (Patsy Edgar, Daniel Morris), and Joe Quetone;
- 2013: David Narcomey & Ruby Beaulieu “Native Americans at Alcatraz: The Untold Story”, and “the American Indian Movement today” with presentation by Bobby Billie, Traditional Seminole, on the Fort of St. Augustine;
- 2014: Panel on “Indigenous Knowledge, Spirituality, and the Future of Humans in Nature”(Marcus Briggs-Cloud (UF), Dr. William Lyon (Kansas), Dr. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (SUNY), Timothy Mesh (UF), Dr. R. Wright (UF),
- 2015: Presentations of music, poetry, and reflection by Tommy Wildcat (Cherokee cultural ambassador), Wathla Recvlohe, Daniel Morris “Native Americans: Recovering Indigenous Identities”;
- 2016: Rev. Dr. Casey Church “Contextualized Ministry and Indigenous Education” & Native American Law Students Association commemoration of Timucua Mound plaque;
- 2017: Dr. Phil Deloria “American Indians in the American Imagination”; student presentation at the Gainesville Regional Utility;
- 2018: Dr. Jose Barreiro, Scholar Emeritus of the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), “Cuban Indigeneity”; panel discussion: “Contemporary Native Communities”;
October “Indigenous Peoples Day”
- 2013: screening of “Native Americans at Alcatraz: The Untold Story”;
- 2016: screening of “The Seventh Fire”;
- 2017: petition circulated on the Plaza in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day;
- 2018: talk: “The Creek Green Corn Ceremony”, Adam Recvlohe; information table on Plaza of the Americas.
Other events
- 2016: Meeting and Exchange between Brazilian Indian leader Ailton Krenak Krenak and the Seminole Tribal Council in Tampa, Florida.