CLICK HERE TO ATTEND IN-PERSON

Please join the UB Humanities Institute and the Department of Indigenous Studies for a special multi-day convening of scholars and community members. This event is free and open to the public, in-person at the University at Buffalo – North Campus (The Buffalo Room | 10 Capen Hall) and as a Zoom webinar.

2024 UB Humanities Institute Conference organized by the Department of Indigenous Studies. This conference is made possible by the UB College of Arts & Sciences, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“In conceiving the theme of the conference, it was my intention to bring together a set of diverse scholars approaching land in a way that was generative, kind, and capacious. Situating the theme around land was about bridging various communities, connecting across various terrains— disciplinary and place-based—that could lead us into a vivacious conversation and new research that begins to answer complex problems. In imagining Property on day two, I take Brenna Bhandar, in The Colonial Lives of Property, question seriously who asks how we might “resist contemporary forms of dispossession without replicating logics of appropriation and possessiveness that rely upon racial regimes for their sustenance” (Bhandar, 2018a, p. 18). Across the two days, I hope we can make the most of this time as theorists, scientists, practitioners, and students who always need to find more spaces to convene and learn from various approaches and perspectives.” – Mishuana Goeman, Convener, Professor and Chair, Department of Indigenous Studies

REGISTER TO ATTEND IN-PERSON

This event will be available as a LIMITED HYBRID event at the discretion of the speaker. Please see the schedule below for sessions that will be available via Zoom. To register for the Zoom webinar, register in advance using the following link:
https://buffalo.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FzK13W4XQLeoB3mf_w4dUQ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Download the digital conference program*

*the PDF is not tagged for screen readers. All information included in the PDF is also on this page.

Schedule

Tuesday, March 5 | Closed Session

Wedneday, March 6 | The Buffalo Room (10 Capen Hall, University at Buffalo)

8:00 am – 9:00 am | Check-in and Breakfast

9:00 am – 9:30 am | Opening

• Ganö:nyök (opening conference) by Mia McKie
• Mishuana Goeman, Convener, Professor and Chair, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo
• Elizabeth Otto, Director, Humanities Institute and Professor, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo
• Theresa McCarthy, Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, Associate Professor and Director, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

9:30 am – 10:00 am | Grounding

• Agnes Williams (Seneca Nation), “The UN Declaration of Indigenous Peoples and Local Education”

10:00 am – 11:00 am | Imagining Care in Landed Practices

• Sandy Grande, University of Connecticut, “Care and the discipline of life-in-place”
• Claudia Ford, University at Buffalo, “The Land Keeps The Score: Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Trauma and Healing”
• Moderator: Gwynn Thomas, University at Buffalo

11:00 am – 11:15 am | Break

11:15 am – 12:00 pm | Responses and Q+A

• led by Mishuana Goeman

12:00 pm – 1:00 pm | Lunch Break

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm | Water Ways

• M Murphy, University of Toronto, “Learning with Birdsong and against Data in Canada’s Chemical Valley” [Not available via Zoom]
• Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguillera, DePaul University, “ Grieving Geographies: Bodies of Water, Intimacy, and Loss in Mexico”
• Isabel Rivera-Collazo, UC San Diego, “With changing land and water: grounded research to understand place, cultural identity, and heritage under threat by changing climate”
• Moderator: Luis Colón, University at Buffalo

2:30 pm – 2:45 pm | Break

2:45 pm – 3:30 pm | Responses and Q+A

• led by Shannon Seneca, University at Buffalo

3:30 pm – 4:30 pm | Reception

Thursday, March 7 | The Buffalo Room (10 Capen Hall, University at Buffalo)

Beyond Property towards Landed Solidarity

8:30 am – 9:00 am | Check-in and Breakfast

9:00 am – 10:00 am | “A Feminist Geography is an Indigenous Geography”

• Presenter: Deondre Smiles, University of Victoria
• Responses and Q+A led by Robert Caldwell, University at Buffalo

10:00 am – 10:10 am | Break

10:10 am – 11:15 am | “Trust in the Land” [Not available via Zoom]

• Presenter: Macarena Gomez-Barris, Brown University
• Responses and Q+A led by Lourdes Vera, University at Buffalo

11:15 am – 11:30 am | Break

11:30 am – 12:30 pm | “Gender/Sexuality Beyond Property”

• Presenter: Tiffany J. King, Duke University [presenting via Zoom]
• Responses and Q+A led by Mia McKie, University at Buffalo

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm | Lunch (Provided for all attendees)

1:30 pm – 2:30 pm | “Symbolic Sovereignty: Indigenous National Flags and Ecological Solidarity” [Not available via Zoom]

• Presenter: Kelsey Leonard, University of Waterloo
• Responses and Q+A led by Jason Corwin, University at Buffalo

2:30 pm – 2:45 pm | Break

2:45 pm – 4:00 pm | “Settler Apologia” [Not available via Zoom]

• Presenter: Audra Simpson, Columbia University
• Responses and Q+A led by Meredith Palmer, University at Buffalo

4:00 pm – 4:30 pm | Coming Together and Plans Forward

4:30 pm | Closing Ganö:nyök by Mia McKie

5:00 – 6:30 pm | Closing Reception at University Club (202 Norton Hall)

• Hearty hors d’oeuvres will be served with one complimentary drink. Open to all attendees.

REGISTER NOW

Welcome Message

Nya:wëh Sgeno! Welcome to the Landed Solidarities conference. When I first move to a place, I like to become landed. That is, I like to understand the plants, birds, and whole environment around me. As I was taught, I like to reach out to the first peoples, across differences, and connect to the various communities in place. Solidarity does not happen instantly or by my saying it. It happens by showing up, working, and planting seeds that will grow into solid relationships. Shawn Wilson reminds us that “an Indigenous research paradigm is relational and maintains relational accountability… so the methodology is simply the building of more relations” (2008, 73). I have gathered people today who have done just this in their research — built more relations. Moments of solidarity are often grown through sharing and caring in place.

In conceiving the theme of the conference, it was my intention to bring together a set of diverse scholars approaching land in a way that was generative, kind, and capacious. Situating the theme around land was about bridging various communities, connecting across various terrains— disciplinary and place-based—that could lead us into a vivacious conversation and new research that begins to answer complex problems. In imagining Property on day two, I take Brenna Bhandar, in The Colonial Lives of Property, question seriously who asks how we might “resist contemporary forms of dispossession without replicating logics of appropriation and possessiveness that rely upon racial regimes for their sustenance” (Bhandar, 2018a, p. 18). Across the two days, I hope we can make the most of this time as theorists, scientists, practitioners, and students who always need to find more spaces to convene and learn from various approaches and perspectives.

My best research days as a scholar have been on the land and in a diverse community. It did not feel like research, work, or a remote glance into a community, but rather, the doing and listening felt good. I only wish we could hold this conversation while planting or working to clean up a site, observe a beach, find the cause of toxins, combat more pollution, make art, or protect cultural heritage. Nevertheless, we do have the listening. We can learn so much from research sites rooted in place and learn to grow as scholars who tackle some of the most pressing issues of the day.

Nya:wëh (thank you),

Mishuana Goeman
Convener
Professor and Chair, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo
President-Elect of the American Studies Association

Participant Bios

Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera, Assistant Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies, DePaul University

Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico. Currently, they are an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. They received their PhD in Latin American Studies from University of Texas at Austin. Their work examines the everyday resistances and alliances between Black and Indigenous women in the community of Zapotalito on the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca. In general, they specialize in environmental racism, ecological grief, mestizaje, state violence, and  anti/de-colonial feminism in Latin America at the intersections of race, gender, environment, and affect. Recently, they published their manuscript Grieving Geographies, Mourning Waters: Race, Gender, and Environment on the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, which won the 2021 NWSA/ University of Illinois Press, First Book Prize. This monograph is an ethnographical and geographical feminist work about an ecocide happening in the Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons and the grief felt by ecological and human loss.

Robert Caldwell, Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

Robert Caldwell is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb, Louisiana. He is the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Indigenous Studies at UB. He is a fellow of the Humanities Institute and was a fellow in Race, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in Global Perspective at the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. He was also the 2020-2021 Katrin L. Lamon Resident Fellow at the School for Advanced Research and a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.

Luis Colón, SUNY Distinguished Professor and A. Conger Goodyear Professor, Chemistry;  Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence, College of Arts and Sciences

At UB, Colón is founder of the Institute for Strategic Enhancement of Educational Diversity (iSEED); the initial co-leader of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning; and a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Race. He has mentored about 60 PhD and master’s students, including many from underrepresented groups. Among Colón’s proudest accomplishments is the creation of a program that has brought dozens of undergraduates from Puerto Rico to UB to do summer research since the 1990s. Many of these students later returned to UB for graduate school. This effort, which Colón developed in partnership with his alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, has been supported through funds from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Sloan Foundation.

Jason Corwin, Clinical Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

Jason Corwin is a citizen of the Seneca Nation, Deer Clan and a lifelong media maker. He was the founding director of the Seneca Media & Communications Center and has produced several short and feature length documentaries. Jason has extensive experience as a community-based environmental educator utilizing digital media to engage with Indigenous ways of knowing, sustainability, and social/environmental justice topics. He earned an MS and PhD in Natural Resources from Cornell University and a BS in Communications from Cornell University. His research is “situated at the confluence of Indigenous ways of knowing, environmental education, and digital media. It highlights Native peoples’ and communities’ work to achieve narrative sovereignty, sustainability, and environmental justice.”

Claudia Jeanne Ford, Professor and Chair, Environmental Studies, SUNY Potsdam and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University at Buffalo

Dr. Claudia Ford has spent four decades working in international development and women’s health. She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Vermont College as well as an MBA in Health Administration and a PhD in Environmental Studies from Antioch University. Currently a professor of Environmental Studies and Chair of the Environmental Studies Department at SUNY Potsdam, Ford’s work has long focused on the intersections of agriculture, traditional knowledges, and women’s health. She teaches, researches, and writes about traditional ecological knowledge, spiritual ecology, entheogenic plant medicine, women’s reproductive health, and sustainable agriculture. She also sits on the boards of the Soul Fire Farm Institute and The Black Farmer Fund Pilot Community, organizations committed to supporting Black and Indigenous farmers and uprooting racial injustice in the food system. A midwife and ethnobotanist, as well as a poet and visual artist, Ford is currently at work on a book project, Black Ecological Wisdom, which will explore the environmental traditions of the Black diaspora for the purpose of planetary healing in this time of environmental crisis.

Mishuana Goeman, Professor and Chair, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

Mishuana Goeman is the daughter of an enrolled Hawk Clan member from Tonawanda Band of Seneca. As a daughter of an ironworker, she traveled throughout the east coast with her father and her family members from job site to job site and made connections with others. In her academic life, she continues to travel and build community. She received her BA at Dartmouth College, MA and PHD from Stanford University’s Modern Thought and Literature program. She has held positions at UCLA as a professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, and she was a Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs. More recently, she moved to the University at Buffalo to help found their Indigenous Studies Department and serve as chair. She has written numerous peer-reviewed articles, contributed to edited collections, and co-edited the Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her first monograph Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (2013)  traces settler colonialism as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, demonstrating how it persists in the contemporary context of neoliberal globalization through literary texts from the 20th century Native women writers. Her forthcoming book, Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World (2023), examines the continuity of imperialist exceptionalism and settler-colonial aesthetics. In addition, Goeman is a Co-PI on a community based digital project grant, Mapping Indigenous L.A., which is a digital humanities and social science project launched in 2015 that maps the stories of multiple communities in Indigenous LA. She has also helped develop Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019), which looks to digital media in order to develop better practices in working with tribal communities as well as improve the flow of information back and forth, particularly on repatriation and NAGPRA issues.

Macarena Gómez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor & Chair, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris, professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of the Modern Culture and Media department, is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is author of four books, including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), which examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism; and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. Gómez-Barris is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press. Her forthcoming book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press), considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She is also on the Social Text Collective, co-Director of the Queer Aqui Project at Columbia University, and on the Executive Editor Board of GLQ. The author of dozens of essays and curatorial events, Gómez-Barris received the Pratt Institute Research Recognition Award (2021-2022) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni Award (2021-2022). In addition to her numerous leadership positions, she is the Founding Director of the Pratt Institute’s Global South Center, in New York City. She also organized a series of workshops and conversations called Writing Media Now, hosted by Brown University’s Department of Modern Culture and Media.

Sandy Grande, Professor, Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Connecticut

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut. She also holds a position in the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. Recently, she was awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019-2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2015) explores the intersection between dominant modes of critical educational theory and the socio-political landscape of American Indian education. In the community, she is a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence. As one of their projects, they published the Standing Rock Syllabus. In addition to her academic and organizing work, she has provided eldercare for her parents for over ten years and remains the primary caregiver for her 92-yr. old father.

Tiffany J King, Associate Professor, Gender and Sexuality, University of Virginia-Main Campus

Tiffany King holds the Barbara and John Glynn Research Professorship in Democracy and Equity at the University of Virginia in the Gender and Sexuality department. King’s work is animated by abolitionist and decolonial traditions within Black Studies and Native/Indigenous Studies. She is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize. This text uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. She also co-edited Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press, 2021). In their forthcoming work, Red and Black Alchemies of Flesh: Conjuring A Decolonial and Abolitionist Now, King turns to the connective threads that bring Black queer feminist and Indigenous/Native queer feminist traditions into intimate and erotic relations. The book project conceptualizes a Black and Indigenous ‘analytics of the flesh’ to think and feel with Black and Indigenous feminist and queer poetics, critique, dreams, ecologies, and praxis as sites of rupture that expose existing decolonial and abolitionist presents and futures. In addition, they are a member of the Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute which will cultivate new relationships and strengthen existing ones among scholars, artists and organizers working at the intersection of Black and Indigenous life.

Kelsey Leonard, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability, University of Waterloo

Dr. Kelsey Leonard is a water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. Dr. Leonard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, where her research focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings. Dr. Leonard seeks to establish Indigenous traditions of water conservation as the foundation for international water policymaking. She represents the Shinnecock Indian Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America’s ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. Her regional ocean policy work in collaboration with Tribes, state, federal and fishery management council entities received a Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in Solutions.

Mia McKie, Clinical Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

Mia McKie is a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation, member of the Turtle Clan and a clinical assistant professor of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto in the Department of History, where her research focuses on gendered and more than human relations through time. She is a Co-Primary Investigator for the Haudenosaunee Archive, Research and Knowledge portal (HARK).

Michelle Murphy, Professor, University of Toronto

Michelle Murphy is a technoscience studies scholar and historian of the recent past whose research concerns decolonial approaches to environmental justice; reproductive justice; Indigenous science and technology studies; infrastructures and data studies; race and science; and finance and economic practices. Dr. Murphy’s current research focuses on the relationships between pollution, colonialism, and technoscience on the lower Great Lakes. Murphy is a tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science & Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice, as well as Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which hosts a lab and is home home for social justice and decolonial approaches to Science and Technology Studies. She is Métis from Winnipeg, from a mixed Métis and French Canadian family. They are a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Meredith Palmer, Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies and Geography, University at Buffalo

Meredith Alberta Palmer is Tuscarora, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations of Ohswé:ken, Grand River), and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research on science and technology’s role in the spatial dynamics of colonialism and racism explores questions of power, refusal, redress, and Indigenous flourishing. Her book manuscript, Dismembered Evidence: colonial geographies of proof and power, grounds her research and questions in the ongoing US occupation of Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous territories. From 2020 to 2023 she was a Presidential Postdoc at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in Geography, and a Masters in Public Health, both from UC Berkeley.

Isabel Rivera-Collazo, Associate Professor, UC San Diego

Isabel Rivera-Collazo is Associate Professor on Biological, Ecological and Human Adaptations to Climate Change at the Department of Anthropology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Directs the SIO Human Ecology Laboratory. Prof. Rivera-Collazo is native to Borikén (Puerto Rico). Her work combines earth sciences, archaeology and marine ecology to understand social vulnerability to climate and environmental change, in particular through food and habitat security in coastal and marine areas. Through geoarchaeology and archaeomalacology, Prof. Rivera-Collazo works to identify lessons from the past that are relevant to communities in the present. Her research project DUNAS, combines sand dune restoration, cultural heritage and climate change to stimulate community resilience. Most recently Prof. Rivera-Collazo leads the California Heritage Climate Vulnerability Index research project together with the CA State Historic Preservation Office. This project seeks to understand the multiple definitions of site importance, and the interface between cultural significance, climate hazards threatening heritage, and prioritization of action to mitigate climate-related impacts. Rivera-Collazo works with the Borikua / Taino communities in Puerto Rico and the Tongva community of Catalina Island in California. Her work highlights the importance of building horizontal partnerships with indigenous communities through citizen science and communal archaeology. Her practice emphasizes collaboration to identify community-relevant research questions, where the recovery of past knowledge can help decolonize historical accounts and can contribute to answer questions and solve climate-related issues in the present. She is a founding member of UCSD Climate Action Lab, and has been awarded the 2020 Climate Adaptation Leader Award and the 2020 UCSD Integrity Award.

Shannon Seneca, Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

Shannon Seneca, PhD, REHS/RS, EIT is a Haudenosaunee environmental engineer with her Bachelor of Science in Physics. Her master’s work was focused on drinking water treatment while she gained expertise in geochemistry, contaminant hydrology and groundwater remediation during her doctoral studies. Dr. Seneca obtained ecosystem restoration training and experience through the University at Buffalo’s National Science Foundation IGERT Ecosystem Restoration through Interdisciplinary Exchange (ERIE) program.  She was the first female Native American to earn her PhD in Engineering at UB in 2012. For almost a decade, Dr. Seneca worked with the Seneca Nation and most recently served as the Seneca Nation Health System’s Environmental Health Director. She recently joined the Center for Indigenous Cancer Research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute as an assistant faculty member to respond to Indigenous community desires to see more active environmental health cancer research. She brings in much diversity as an Indigenous person and an environmental engineer delving into environmental health to tackle the impact of environmental contaminants on human health. Dr. Seneca strives to be a part of many interdisciplinary teams as each individual brings unique backgrounds to the table to solve large scale problems together.

Audra Simpson, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University

Audra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her concentration is political anthropology, focusing on contextualizing the force and consequences of governance through time, space, and bodies. Her research and writing is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and at the cross-sections of the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics. Her groundbreaking book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014), won the Sharon Stephens Prize (AES), the “Best first Book Award” (NAISA) as well as the Lora Romero Award (ASA) in addition to honorable mentions. It was a Choice Academic Title for 2014. This monograph boldly challenges dominant thinking through an examination of the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke’s struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism through a politics of refusal. In addition to her first book, Simpson co-edited Theorizing Native Studies with Andrea Smith. More recently, her research has explored a genealogy of affective governance and extraction across the US and Canada. Outside of her scholarship, Simpson has been called upon to serve as New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, convened to respond to protests around public commemoration in the city.

Deondre Aaron Smiles, Assistant Professor, Geography, University of Victoria

Deondre Smiles (he/them as well as the Ojibwemowin pronoun wiin) is of Ojibwe, Black, and Swedish descent, and is a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. An Indigenous geographer whose research interests are multifaceted, including Indigenous geographies/epistemologies, science and technology studies, and tribal cultural resource preservation/protection, Smiles is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. Deondre Smiles received his bachelor’s degree in Geography (2013) from Saint Cloud State University, a master’s degree in Global Indigenous Studies (2016) from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and a Ph.D. in Geography (2020) from The Ohio State University, where he also spent a year (2020-21) as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History. He currently serves in a number of leadership roles within the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Smiles is also a member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and the Canadian Association of Geographers. (CAG). Smiles serves as the PI of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, or GIF Lab, a lab that focuses on Indigenous geographic methods and collaborations with Indigenous communities. This is alongside an affiliation with Dr. Heather Castleden’s HEC Lab (University of Victoria) and the EGESTA Lab (University of British Columbia). He also serves as a member of the editorial board of the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies, and serve on the Board of Trustees of Leech Lake Tribal College.

Gwynn Thomas, Associate Professor, Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo

Gwynn Thomas (Chile) is an associate professor in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She served as the founding chair of the department of GGSS from 2018-2024. Her first book, Contesting Legitimacy in Chile: Familial Ideals, Citizenship, and Political Struggle, 1970–1990 (2011), examines the mobilization of familial beliefs in Chilean political conflicts. Her published work on gender politics, feminist movements, women’s political leadership and participation, and feminist institutionalism appears in The Journal of Women, Politics and Policy; The International Feminist Journal of Politics; Gender & Politics; The Journal of Latin American Studies; Comparative Politics; Comparative Political Studies; Journal of Politics in Latin Americas; and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, as well as a number of important edited collections. She received the Elsa Chaney Award in 2007 from the Gender and Feminist Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association. She is currently working on the relationships between the growth of vibrant feminist movements and the rise of a new form of right-wing politics in Chile, and across Latin America.

Lourdes Vera, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Environment and Sustainability, University at Buffalo

Dr. Lourdes Vera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Department of Environment and Sustainability at UB. As an environmental sociologist and civic scientist, she works with communities living near oil and gas development to monitor their air for contaminants. She also serves on the coordinating committee of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a collaborative research organization that emphasizes the importance of publicly available environmental information, envisioning and building digital tools and research infrastructures for environmental data justice. While still a PhD Candidate at Northeastern University, Vera won the Sociology Department’s Outstanding Contributions to Public Sociology award in 2018 for her work with EDGI as well as her community-based participatory research work that helped to develop a low-cost tool for the monitoring of hydrogen sulfide, which helped to build a grassroots research organization in Karnes County, Texas. More recently, in 2021, she won the American Sociological Association’s Robert Boguslaw award, given to outstanding researchers whose work explores the relationship between technology and humanism. Vera’s interdisciplinary work spans environmental science, social science, and critical theory with articles appearing in Atmospheric Environment, Engaging Science, Technology and Society, and Mobilization.

Agnes Williams, Community Consultant, Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo

Agnes Williams is enrolled in the Seneca Nation of Indians Cattaraugus Territory. She is a graduate of Syracuse University in the School of Social Work where she received her BA and Master’s degree. At the University of Buffalo, she received a second Master’s degree in Native American Studies and became a doctoral candidate in UB’s American Studies program. Her community organizing includes founding the Central Committee of Women of All Red Nations (WARN) in Rapid City, South Dakota, and the Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN), as well as the coordination of the American Indian Bay Area Interagency-Oakland California that spawned the first Longest Walk from San Francisco to Washington DC in 1978. Her work experience is quite extensive, as she has also worked with the Seneca Nation of Indians as the Education Director, Johnson O’Malley Coordinator, and as a Family Counselor at CIRHC-Wellness Center. She was the Director of Native American Special Services at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.  She was also the Director of the Urban Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland, California, a Perinatal Social Worker for the Native American Health Center, and an Adult Education teacher/proposal writer for the San Francisco Indian Center. She is currently the President of the Indigenous Women’s Network and volunteers as a Coordinator of the Indigenous Women’s Initiatives here in Buffalo, hosting a monthly Talking Circle on the second Thursday of each month from noon to 3 pm at the Network of Religious Communities. She also hosts a half hour WJYE/ WBUF/WBLK radio show “Crossroads” on the fourth Sunday of each month about traditional life ways. Currently, Williams is a social work field supervisor for the UB School of Social Work in her volunteer role as an Indigenous Women’s Initiatives (IWI) Coordinator. She is also active with the newly created Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo as a community consultant.