The Emory community is invited to learn about and provide input into a university-wide project to develop physical reminders and rituals on Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses to honor Muscogee language and knowledge as the indigenous language and knowledge of this land. To get started on the process toward the Path, will be a series of open engagement sessions with the Native-led consulting firm Kauffman Associates, Inc. (KAI). The first is a faculty and staff session on the Oxford Campus.

RSVP is required. All events are in-person encouraged, but there is also a Zoom option if needed. RSVP for in-person here or zoom here.

Time: Thursday, April 7, 2022, 10:00-11:30am

Place: Oxford Campus, Dean’s Dining Room

To learn more about the Indigenous Language Path, please visit: https://president.emory.edu/race-social-justice/task-force/language-path.html

Please note that additional engagement opportunities are being planned for the Fall 2022 semester.

With questions, please contact religiouslife [at] emory [dot] edu.

Film screening of “Denying Access: NoDAPL to NoNAPL” by Dr. James Corwin and Tami Watt. Followed by an open discussion with Dr. James Corwin, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Buffalo and citizen of the Seneca Nation (Deer Clan).

Free and open to the public. Mask required. No food or beverages.

Time: Wednesday, March 23rd at 7:00pm EST

Place: White Hall, Room 207

Event is co-sponsored by Emory University Hightower Fund, Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, Department of Anthropology, Department of Environmental Sciences, Department of Film and Media Studies, and Department of History. In conjunction with ant 280 class “Indigenous Peoples of North America” (Prof. Vidali).

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese presents a public lecture by Professor Leonardo Velloso-Lyons titled: Imperial History, Quechua Philology, and the Andean Hinterlands

Time: Tuesday, March 1st at 2:30PM EST

Place: Oxford Road Building Presentation Room (1390 Oxford Road)

Description: Professor Velloso-Lyons is currently Mabelle McLeod Lewis Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. This talk is the first product of Velloso-Lyons’s second book project, which springs from his findings concerning early modern knowledge, colonialism, genre and rhetoric. It examines how writers deploy their knowledge of non-European languages and cultures to create a hierarchy of regional groups legible to colonial authorities. These writers’s use of non-European languages in historical and literary works creates what he tentatively calls “implied geographies” that order, homogenize, and even efface certain non-European groups for the benefit of other non-European groups. Although Velloso-Lyons’s focus remains on writers from the many reaches of the Ibero-Atlantic empire, he turns away from the sixteenth-century’s reckoning with global colonialism toward seventeenth-century writers’ attempting (and ultimately failing) to create uniformity among non-European groups by effacing the ethnic and cultural diversity of each region in favor of uniform identities that would fit better the colonial superstructure. Velloso-Lyons currently anticipates chapters on Viceregal Peru, New Spain, Brazil, the Kingdom of Kongo, and Granada; this talk focuses on the Andean world, introducing some of the problems he expects to discuss with respect to sources from these regions.

Emory College and the James Weldon Johnson Institute presents First Fridays at 4: Emory Faculty on Race

Title: “The Violence of Natural Law: Race, Indigeneity, and Citizenship”

March 4th, 2022 from 4pm-5:30pm. Zoom link here.

Speaker: Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History

Talk Moderator: Dr. Falguni Sheth, Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies

Event description: Dr. Lowery, a historian of identity and sovereignty in American Indian nations, will talk with Dr. Sheth, a political philosopher of race and gender, about the invention of natural law in the 17th and 18th centuries and how its ramifications are felt today.

The Emory Global Health Institute presents the Decolonizing Global Health Series of 2022. The second installment of this series will be a panel discussion about Emory University’s global health partnerships with indigenous people – and the ways in which we can decolonize, reconstruct, and ensure equity in these relationships.

Join the event from 12:00-1:00PM EST on Feb. 25, 2022, for the second installment of “Ensuring Equitable Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples in the U.S.” You can register here.

Speakers include: Beth Michel MPH (Associate Dean of Admissions and Lead for Native American Affairs, Emory), Seh Welch PhD (President, AI/AN/NH coalition, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and Lorrie King MPH (Instructor, MDP, Emory; Special Projects Director, Romero Institute’s Lakota People’s Law Proect)

To watch the recording of the first installment of this series, click here.

Objectives:

• Increase awareness of the role of colonization on academic global health partnerships in the U.S. and in low-and-middle income countries
• Create a platform for partners to share challenges, lessons learned, and recommendations for more equitable engagement in global health
• Compile best practices for global health partnerships at Emory University

The Emory English Department is hosting a series of speakers on Native American and Indigenous Literature and Culture. Emil’ Keme is the second in this speaker series, with his talk titled: The Maya Environmental Imagination. Humberto Ak’abal’s The Animal Gathering

Join us on Friday, 2/25 at 4:00PM EST over Zoom to hear Emil’ Keme of UNC speak.

Link to Zoom here.

Description:
This presentation focuses on K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal’s first book of poetry, The Animal Gathering (1990). I argue that in his invocation of animals, Ak’abal develops a critique of Western modernity and, more specifically, the armed conflict and genocide against Maya peoples in Guatemala. The destruction of the Indigenous world in Abiayala (The Americas)–Ak’abal’s work suggests–has generated a profound crisis in humanity that has come to undermine a loss in our original relationship with animals, Mother Earth, and the planet as a whole.  Ak’abal’s poetry book expresses these concerns through the existential crisis of the poetic voice who, once he encounters the animals invoked, aims to reconnect with them, the natural world, and his ancestral origins.

Bio:
Emil’ Keme (K’iche’ Maya Nation) is a member of the Maya anticolonial collective Ix’b’alamquej Junajpu Wunaq’ and Associate Professor at UNC-CH. He is the convener of the Critical Ethnic Studies collective at Carolina, and the author of the book Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word (2021), which was awarded Cuba’s 2020 Casa de las Americas literary criticism prize.

Emory English Department is hosting a series of speakers on Native American and Indigenous Literature and Culture.

Join us on Monday, 2/28 from 4:00-5:30PM EST over Zoom to hear Sharon Holland speak.

Link to Zoom here.

Bio: Sharon P. Holland holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of Michigan and is the author of RAISING THE DEAD: READINGS OF DEATH AND (BLACK) SUBJECTIVITY. She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Professor Holland is also the author of The Erotic Life of Racism, a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory. For more information on her work, see her blog.

Spring 2022 Seminars for the Interdisciplinary Workshop in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Speaker schedule listed below.

All seminars located in the Major Room, Bowden Hall 323. From 4:15-5:45PM EST. In compliance with Emory University’s COVID-19 protocols, masks are required.

Tuesday, March 15: Professor Malinda Lowery (History) Indigenous Oral History in the South 

Thursday, March 17: Professor Sa’ed Atshan (Anthropology) Natives and Palestinians: Transnational Indigenous Solidarity

Tuesday, March 22: Professor Mariana Candido (History) Women, Power, Property: Gendered Strategies to Secure Rights in 19th-century Angola

Tuesday, March 29: Professor Emerita Kristin Mann (History) Freedom, Return, and Incorporation into New Homelands: The Transatlantic Lives of Yoruba Enslaved in the 19th-century

Tuesday, May 3: One-day graduate student workshop on colonial and postcolonial studies

(For questions, contact Hugo Hansen at hugo [dot] hansen [at] emory [dot] edu)