This conference takes place in Lenapehoking, on the unceded and occupied lands of the Lenape. Our gathering acknowledges and pays respect to Lenape ancestors, peoples today, and the Lenape future to come – across Lenapehoking and the Lenape diaspora.

From this local site of Lenapehoking – and from the ground of Princeton’s colonial condition – Indigenous/Settler examines methods for thinking across geographies, building alliances, and fighting settler colonialism at large without abandoning attention to specific histories and struggles. As the resistance at Standing Rock mainstreamed expressions of global Indigenous solidarity in 2016, this conference hopes to explore and historicize, as much as carefully practice, what has been called “trans” or “pan” or “global” Indigenous studies.

Bringing together scholars and activists who work on diverse forms of indigeneity and settler coloniality, our motivating questions for the conference include:

• What kinds of methods can be recruited to think across specific and located histories? How might we assemble frameworks and languages for doing global work within and beyond comparativism?
• What were/are the media of old and new trans-indigenisms? How do long histories of Indigenous cosmopolitanism and transnationalism articulate with contemporary renditions? What are the paradigms for local/global negotiation that derive from situated Indigenous practices and intellectual traditions? Where and how does an ethic of global indigeneity emerge?
• How does thinking broadly about indigeneity and settlement open up new directions in adjacent fields? What does the binary of “Indigenous/Settler” enable, and what does it obscure? How does Indigenous studies and its numerous intersections – with the environmental humanities, with Black studies, with gender and sexuality studies etc. – elicit a better grasp of settler colonialism? How is settler coloniality a useful lens for reading the nation-state and its relationship to non-Indigenous as much as Indigenous peoples? What does/must coalition-building look like?
• How can we account for the divergent ways in which “Native Studies” fields have evolved across settler institutions? What kinds of pressures does Indigenous critique exert on the university?

Speakers:

Audra Simpson (Columbia University) – keynote

Chelsea Vowel (University of Alberta) – keynote

Chadwick Allen (University of Washington)

Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez (University of Alberta)

Billy-Ray Belcourt (University of Alberta)

Glen Coulthard (University of British Columbia / Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning)

Desiree Kane (multi-media journalist and organizer)

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Wesleyan University)

Erica Violet Lee (University of Toronto)

John Little (University of Minnesota)

Kyle Mays (University of California, Los Angeles)

Maggie McKinley (University of Pennsylvania)

Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University)

Bernard Perley (University of Wisconsin)

Chief Dwaine Perry (Ramapough Lenape Nation)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (independent scholar / Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning)

Kyle Powys Whyte (Michigan State University)

For more information, including a schedule of events, visit the conference website here.

All sessions are free and open to the public. Register here.