The University of Arizona Press

When: Monday, April 24, 2023,  5 pm PT / 6 pm MT/ 7 pm CT/ 8 pm ET / 9 pm in Puerto Rico

Where: Free on Zoom, Register in advance here

Nylda Dieppa of Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club will interview poet Cynthia Guardado. Guardado’s recent book, Cenizas, is also the April Book of the Month for the book club.

Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. The speaker of these poems—the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants—questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history. Cynthia Guardado’s poems give voice to the grief of family trauma, while capturing moments of beauty and tenderness. Maternal figures preside over the verses, guiding the speaker as she searches the ashes of history to tell her family’s story. The spare, narrative style of the poems are filled with depth as the family’s layers come to light.

Cynthia Guardado (she/her/hers) is a Los Angeles–born Salvadoran poet and professor. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Cenizas and ENDEAVOR. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, U.S. Latinx Voices in Poetry, and The Wandering Song. Guardado won the Concurso Binacional De Poesía Pellicer-Frost in 2017, and Cenizas was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2019.

When: Saturday, April 22, 10 am, Hawaiʻi time ( 5 pm PT / 6 pm MT/ 7 pm CT/ 8 pm ET)

Where: Free on Zoom, registration is required

In celebration of National Poetry Month, join Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate Brandy Nālani McDougall as she shares her unique and empowering stories of Hawaii through poetry. Her second poetry collection, ʻĀina Hānau, Birth Land, is available now. The Hawai‘i State Public Library system hosts the event to discover ways to appreciate, create and write poetry to connect with others and embrace all the beauty Hawai‘i has to offer. Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi, she/her/ʻo ia)  lives with her family in Kalaepōhaku in the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī on Oʻahu.

‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.

When: Tuesday, September 13, 2022 from 5:30pm to 6:30pm (MDT)

Where: Online. Register here!

The authors will pre-record their book talk and will be available for questions. In A Diné History of Navajoland, co-authors Klara Kelley and Harris Francis show for the first time a sweeping history of the Diné that is foregrounded in oral tradition. Authors Klara Kelley and Harris Francis share Diné history from pre-Columbian time to the present, using ethnographic interviews in which Navajo people reveal their oral histories on key events such as Athabaskan migrations, trading and trails, Diné clans, the Long Walk of 1864, and the struggle to keep their culture alive under colonizers who brought the railroad, coal mining, trading posts, and, finally, climate change. The early chapters, based on ceremonial origin stories, tell about Diné forebears. Next come the histories of Diné clans from late pre-Columbian to early post-Columbian times, and the coming together of the Diné as a sovereign people. Later chapters are based on histories of families, individuals, and communities, and tell how the Diné have struggled to keep their bond with the land under settler encroachment, relocation, loss of land-based self-­sufficiency through the trading-post system, energy resource extraction, and climate change. Archaeological and documentary information supplements the oral histories, providing a comprehensive investigation of Navajo history and offering new insights into their twentieth-century relationships with Hispanic and Anglo settlers. For Diné readers, the book offers empowering histories and stories of Diné cultural sovereignty. “In short,” the authors say, “it may help you to know how you came to be where—and who—you are.”

When: Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 5:30pm to 6:30pm (MDT)

Where: Online. Register here!

The editors of Transforming Diné Education: Innovations in Pedagogy and Practice gather the voices of Diné scholars, educators, and administrators to offer critical insights into contemporary programs that place Diné-centered pedagogy into practice. Bringing together decades of teaching experience, contributors offer perspectives from school- and community-based programs, as well as the tribal, district, and university level. They address special education, language revitalization, wellness, self-determination and sovereignty, and university-tribal-community partnerships. These contributions foreground Diné ways of knowing both as an educational philosophy and as an active practice applied in the innovative programs the book highlights. The contributors deepen our understanding of the state of Navajo education by sharing their perspectives about effective teaching practices and the development of programs that advance educational opportunities for Navajo youth. This work provides stories of Diné resilience, resistance, and survival. It articulates a Diné-centered pedagogy that will benefit educators and learners for generations to come.

Transforming Diné Education fills a need in the larger literature of curricular and programmatic development and provides tools for academic success for all American Indian students. Contributors to the book include: Berlinda Begay, Lorenda Belone, Michael “Mikki” Carroll, Quintina “Tina” Deschenie, Henry Fowler, Richard Fulton, Davis E. Henderson, Kelsey Dayle John, Lyla June Johnston, Tracia Keri Jojola, Tiffany S. Lee, Shawn Secatero, Michael Thompson, Pedro “Pete” Vallejo, Christine B. Vining, Vincent Werito, and Duane “Chili” Yazzie.

When: Tuesday, July 12, 2022 from 5:30pm to 6:30pm (MDT)

Where: Online. Register here!

A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body unravels the tangle of federal and state education programs that have been imposed on Navajo people and illuminates the ongoing efforts by tribal communities to transfer state authority over Diné education to the Navajo Nation. On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. An iron grip of colonial domination over Navajo education remains, thus inhibiting a unified path toward educational sovereignty. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.

A VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents: The Southwest North American region since 1540

Thursday 19 May 2022 at 4.00-6.00pm (BST)

This webinar will be held on Zoom. Please register here.

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between:
author Prof Carlos Velez-Ibanez (Arizona State University)
reviewer Prof Anthony Grant (Edge Hill University),
chaired by Dr Martin Edwardes (King’s College London)

Well-regarded author Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions were not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodating and at other times forcefully imposed. Such impositions created discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multi-layered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages-even the invention of community-created trilingual dictionaries.

Velez-Ibanez gives particular attention to the region, including both sides of the border, explaining the consequences of the fragile splitting of the area through geopolitical border formation. He illustrates the many ways those discontents have manifested in linguistic, cultural, educational, political, and legal forms.

From revolt to revitalization, from silent objection to expressive defiance, people in the Southwest North American Region have developed arcs of discontent from the Spanish colonial period to the present. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work discusses the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the Funds of Knowledge concept as creative contemporary discontents with monolingual approaches.

When: Friday, January 14, 2022
at 1 pm (California)/ 3 pm (CDMX)/ 5 pm (Canada)/ 8 am (Australia)/ 10 pm (Denmark)

Where: https://tinyurl.com/livehernandez

Speakers:
Suzi Hutchings
(RMIT University/Australia)

Brian Noble
(Dalhousie University/Canada)

Rosalva Aida Hernandez
(CIESAS/Mexico)

Emiliana Cruz
(CIESAS/Mexico)

Moderator:
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros
(Standford CLAS)

Transcontinental Dialogues brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropologists from Mexico, Canada, and Australia who work at the intersection of Indigenous rights, advocacy, and action research. These engaged anthropologists explore how obligations manifest in differently situated alliances, how they respond to such obligations, and the consequences for anthropological practice and action.

When: Tuesday, November 30 at 5:30 P.M. MST

Where: Zoom

Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures. This book works to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs. Returning Home provides a view into the students’ experiences and their connections to Diné community and land. Despite the initial Intermountain Indian School agenda to send Diné students away and permanently relocate them elsewhere, Diné student artists and writers returned home through their creative works by evoking senses of Diné Bikéyah and the kinship that defined home for them. Returning Home uses archival materials housed at Utah State University, as well as material donated by surviving Intermountain Indian School students and teachers throughout Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Artwork, poems, and other creative materials show a longing for cultural connection and demonstrate cultural resilience. This work was shared with surviving Intermountain Indian School students and their communities in and around the Navajo Nation in the form of a traveling museum exhibit, and now it is available in this thoughtfully crafted volume. By bringing together the archived student arts and writings with the voices of living communities, Returning Home traces, recontextualizes, reconnects, and returns the embodiment and perpetuation of Intermountain Indian School students’ everyday acts of resurgence.

The book can be purchased here.

Register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrd-ygqjsrH9dX5yKv4v_CKYYpAil3zgSY