Seminar Overview
The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar “Indigenous Futures in Times of Crisis,” headed by Princeton University Professor Elizabeth Ellis and New York University (NYU) Professor Jane Anderson, brings together Indigenous community leaders, activists, artists, and scholars from across the Americas and the Pacific into critical conversations about Indigenous health and sovereignty in the past, present, and future. Seminar discussants present distinct modes of understanding Indigenous wellbeing of not just individual bodies but also of lands, waters, skies, cultures, and intellectual vitality among diverse Indigenous communities. This seminar hosts discussions at both NYU and Princeton University.
Indigenous Futures in Times of Crisis, November 14th 2024
This inaugural Sawyer Seminar at NYU will feature three Passamaquoddy citizens — Donald Soctomah, Newell Lewey, and Dwayne Tomah — who will join us to discuss the overlapping work of language reclamation, the return of the first sound recordings made on Native homelands, and the ongoing cultural documentation of significant petroglyphs using digital mapping techniques.
Sovereignty as Fraught Relationality: The Case of Osage Wind, November 15th 2024
Too often the stories told about Indigenous peoples flatten the complexity of Native nation experiences, especially around environmental sovereignty and relationality. This chapter explores the deep politics behind the building and dismantling of an industrial wind farm on the Osage reservation, as a powerful window into the complexity of these issues. Colonial systems have rendered Osages a minority population in our own territory, forcing our leaders to build fraught relationships to maintain our Nation. This chapter looks at how Osage relationships with the federal government and non-Osage residents living on the reservation have impacted Osage sovereignty. In this context, the Osage Nation has attempted to use the concepts of “responsibility” and “public interest” to defend its sovereignty, which have had mixed results historically, and must be navigated carefully as a strategy to take us forward.
Wellbeing and Indigenous Literature in the 21st Century, December 2nd 2024
This event will highlight wellbeing in Indigenous literature in the 21st century through the groundbreaking work of novelist Oscar Hokeah (Cherokee Nation, Kiowa Tribe, and Mexican), author of Calling for a Blanket Dance (2022), and poet Santee Frazier (Cherokee Nation) author of Dark Thirty (2019) and Aurum (2019). This event is part of the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Indigenous Futures in Times of Crisis, which is a collaboration between New York University (NYU) and Princeton University.
