When: July 5, 2023, 12:00 p.m. MDT
Where: online via the Museum of New Mexico
Shelby Tisdale will present her book, No Place for a Lady, in an online presentation “Marjorie F. Lambert: Museum of New Mexico’s Curator of Archaeology, 1936-1969.” The event is free and open to the public.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who not only stayed and left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology but flourished.
Shelby Tisale is the Retired Director, Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and Former Director, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe.
About the book:
In this delightful biography, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.
Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession.
When: Sunday, July 31, 6:30 p.m. UTC+1
Where: The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, and streaming online
Join the Natural History Museum for an enlightening evening as Professor Dante Lauretta, Sir Brian May, and the museum’s researcher Professor Sara Russell as they give an insider’s overview of the ground-breaking OSIRIS-REx mission. Hear all about what Dante and Brian discovered during their recent collaborative study of Bennu– Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid— and hear from Sara about how her team is preparing to analyze the sample. The authors will also share projections of captivating stereoscopic 3-D images of Bennu that became a part of the successful effort to find a safe landing site for the mission. The three will come together for the talk “Analysing Asteroids: From Bennu back to Base.”
Click here to learn more about online viewing options. Tickets are required for online viewing and cost £ 5.50, or about $7.00.
Lauretta and May will share thrilling 3-D imagery that provided vital information for the current OSIRIS-REx mission. In addition, Natural History Museum researcher Professor Sara Russell will share how her team are preparing to analyze the returned sample to unlock the secrets it holds. She’ll be delving into how analysis of it could help reveal not only how planets are formed but how life as we know it began.
Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.
Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. Study of the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, but Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four-and-a-half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.
Date: February 14, 2026
Time: 10 a.m., MST
Place: Tucson Botanical Gardens, 2150 North Alvernon Way, Tucson, AZ
Carolyn Niethammer will talk about “Cactus, Corn, and Cattle: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage” at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. She will trace the big changes in diet in the Santa Cruz River Valley over the last 4,000 years. She recently received the 2025 Jim Griffith Foodways Keeper Award. Niethammer is the author of A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage, which will be available for purchase and signing. The event is free with admission to the Tucson Botanical Gardens. Space is limited, so please register online.
About the book:
Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. This book offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.
Both family supper tables and the city’s trendiest restaurants feature native desert plants and innovative dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples. Award-winning writer Carolyn Niethammer deliciously shows how the Sonoran Desert’s first farmers grew tasty crops that continue to influence Tucson menus and how the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and Chinese farmers influenced what Tucsonans ate.
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: March 7, 2023 at 6:00 p.m., MST
Where: Zoom, register here.
Join Archaeology Café on March 7, 2023, when Stewart Koyiyumptewa (Hopi Cultural Preservation Office) and Wes Bernardini (University of Redlands) will discuss “Collaborative Archaeology and the ‘Becoming Hopi’ Project.” For nearly two decades, Hopi tribal members and external scholars have collaborated on a monumental history of the Hopi Mesas. We will discuss the importance of collaboration and how tribal perspectives have changed our understanding of Hopi history.
Can’t join the session live? No problem! About a week after each café, Archaeology Southwest will post videos of each presentation to the video archive on their website and to their YouTube channel. They’ll share links on their Facebook and Twitter and in their Southwest Archaeology Today and This Month at Archaeology Southwest email newsletters.
About Archaeology Café:
Presented by Archaeology Southwest, a nonprofit organization that explores and protects heritage places while honoring their diverse values, Archaeology Café is an informal forum that brings lifelong learners together with experts.
Learn more about the award-winning volume Becoming Hopi here.
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.
The University of Arizona Press
