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Events

Upcoming Events

  • Th., Feb. 27, 2025, 4:30 pm, McCook Auditorium, historian Marcy Norton, author of The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, History department’s Mead lecture, thanks to planning work by Professor Clark Alejandrino, Kathleen Kete, Tom Wickman, and other members of the History department.
  • TBD: Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma), author of There There and Wandering Stars, Goodwin Theater, Austin Arts Center, A.K. Smith Reading Series, thanks to planning work by Professors Catina Bacote, Ciaran Berry, and Ethan Rutherford, hoping to be rescheduled.

Selected Past Events Related to Indigenous Studies

  • Deborah Jackson Taffa (Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo), author of Whiskey Tender, A.K. Smith Reading Series, Tu., Nov. 12, 2024, 4:30 pm, Smith House, thanks to planning work by Professors Catina Bacote, Ciaran Berry, and Ethan Rutherford.
  • Sat., Nov. 9, 2024, trip to MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, led by Professor Lynn Sullivan, to see the exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT.
  • Saukiog Harvest Festival, Saturday, October 12, 2024, Keney Park Sustainability Project, 183 Windsor Avenue, Windsor, organized by members of greater Hartford’s Indigenous community in collaboration with Hartford Public Library and other partners and co-sponsors.
  • Yootay Singers and the Mashantucket Pequot Community Drum Group, Th., Oct. 3, 12:15-1:15 pm, Gruss Music Hall, organized by Professor Dora Hast.
  • Group visit to the New Britain Museum of American Art, led by Professor Lynn Sullivan, to see the exhibition, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, Sept. 14, 2024.
  • “The Jingle Dress Project: Native Women in Leadership,” panel discussion moderated by Chenille Jake (’24), photography by Eugene Tapahe, and dance performance by Dion and Erin Tapahe, introduced by Kim O’Brien, WGRAC, Queer Resource Center.
  • “Skoden: The Rise of Native American Pop Culture,” Sebastian Barb ’06 (Choctaw-Apache Band of Ebarb), March 5, 2024, planned by Professor Lynn Sullivan in association with the Trinity Arts Initiative.
  • Virtual Screening of short documentary film by Mohawk artist and water protection activist Layla Staats, November 30, 2023, featuring a panel with Chenille Jake (’24), Clara Sams (’26), and Mariana Cournoyer (’24), organized by Professor Diana Aldrete, co-sponsored by Human Rights and the Office of Multicultural Affairs.
  • The Hartford/Saukiog Harvest Festival, EHI Equestrian & Therapeutic Center, 337 Vine Street, Hartford, October 14, 2023, featured a panel with Chenille Jake (’23) and musical performance by Lee Mixashawn Rozie (’12), among many others. The event was organized by a Hartford-based planning committee in collaboration with Hartford Public Library and many co-sponsors and has been held since 2019.
  • “The Design of Black and Native Liberation, with Sebastian Ebarb ’06,” February 27, 2023, co-sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the History department, as part of Black History Month.
  • “Native Americans Making Film and TV,” trailer screening and conversation led by Chenille Jake (Diné, class of 2024), November 30, 2022, about Native American screenwriters, showrunners, directors, actors, and crew members making film and TV in 2022 and beyond, as well as a meal provided by Wampanoag chef Sherry Pocknett’s Sly Fox Den restaurant, and comments by Pocknett’s daughter and partner in the business, Jade Galvin.
  • “Mapping My Mother’s Nations,” lecture by Professor Mary McNeil (Mashpee Wampanoag), Ann Plato Fellow, History Department, with reception before, and dinner afterward, April 26, 2022. Building upon Indigenous geographer and literary scholar Mishauna Goeman’s concept of “remapping,” the talk utilized family history to trace Afro-Indigenous identity, migration, and belonging in Massachusetts during the Black Power/ Red Power era.
  • “Native American and Indigenous Studies at Trinity: A Conversation and Shared Meal,” November 18, 2021, which featured a panel conversation about an online Native American and Indigenous Studies research guide and a meal catered by Sly Fox Den, an Indigenous catering and food education business founded by Wampanoag chef Sherry Pocknett. The panel featured Chenille Jake (Diné, class of 2024); Mary McNeil (Mashpee Wampanoag), Ann Plato fellow in History; Thomas Wickman, associate professor of History and American Studies; Cait Kennedy, Research, Technology and Outreach Librarian; and Yoli Bergstrom-Lynch, research librarian.

Reading Group featured book and author visits:

  • Spring 2020 Shannon Speed (Chickasaw), Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State 
  • Fall 2019 Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds
  • Spring 2019 Ellen Cushman (Cherokee), The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance (visit April 5, 2019)
  • Fall 2018 Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (visit December 12, 2018)
  • Spring 2018 Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (visit March 27, 2018)
  • Fall 2017 Sandy Grande (Quechua), Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (visit December 12, 2017)

Additional visiting writers and scholars:

  • Kiara Vigil (Dakota/Apache), cultural and intellectual historian (February 13, 2020)
  • Natalie Diaz (Mojave), poet and language activist (Fall 2019)
  • Hidden Literacies Symposium (including presentations by Ellen Cushman [Cherokee], Margaret Noodin [Anishinaabe], Phillip Round, Caroline Wigginton, Kelly Wisecup) (April 5, 2019)
  • Ned Blackhawk (Shoshone), historian (Fall 2014)
  • Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki), poet (Spring 2014)
  • Coll Thrush, historian (Spring 2014)

Other Campus Events:

  • José Ginocchio Moraiz and Gabriel R. Sorondo Guirola, “The Owners, the Keepers, and the Masters: A documentary to raise awareness and promote justice for the human rights of indigenous communities in Salta, Argentina,” November 16, 2021, organized by the Center for Urban and Global Studies
  • Watkinson Library Indigenous Materials reception, Spring 2019
  • Blanket Exercise, Akomawt Educational Initiative, led by endawnis Spears and Chris Newell, organized by S.A.I.L. director Nikia Bryant, December 4, 2018
  • “This Native Place: Joseph Johnson and the Writerly World of 18th-Century Indigenous Connecticut” Hilary Wyss, Inaugural talk for the Allan K. Smith and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of English, April 17, 2018