Seminars

At a time when climate finance is calling for greater transparency, accountability, and direct access for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, a critical question emerges: What if monitoring systems were designed from the territories themselves? This event will showcase AMECLA, an innovative, territorially driven Accompaniment, Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, and Adaptation system that brings together Indigenous and community priorities, intercultural knowledge, and international accountability standards. Built on territorial experience and lessons from the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests and the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, AMECLA demonstrates a new way to generate credible evidence of the impact of direct territorial investments while strengthening community ownership, adaptive management, and decision-making. Join Indigenous leaders, territorial organizations, donors, and strategic partners for an exchange of practical experiences, lessons, and challenges, and a forward-looking conversation on how territorial and intercultural approaches can reshape the future of climate finance impact measurement.

In the final event of the Indigenous Studies Seminar, we invite the community to a collective conversation on the politics and possibilities of Indigenous Studies in our current moment. How can Indigenous Studies, Native scholars and communities, and Native history speak to our present moment of crisis? In the context of new and ongoing colonial wars, the criminalization of entire communities based on their gender identity, legal status, and place of origin, what role can Indigenous Studies play in struggles for liberation? And given the ongoing attacks on higher education, and ethnic studies in particular, how do we as educators and scholars respond? To put it simply, in dark times, what songs do we need? What songs will we sing? This roundtable conversation will feature Shannon Speed (UCLA), Alan Shane Dillingham (ASU).

This work opens a dialogue on Indigenous belonging and returns by centering water, interdependence, and community-based action across urban spaces in the United States and Mexico. It examines how Indigenous activists and migrants navigate criminalization, state militarization, and the fear imposed on minoritized communities, grounding its analysis in situated struggles in New Jersey—on occupied Native land—and among Binnizá (Zapotec) communities in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca. Across these contexts, we witness the intensification of extractive economies, the commodification of bodies -both human and more-than-human-, and the reshaping of land and water. In response, collaborations among Indigenous activists, artists, and educators generate spaces to rearticulate Indigeneity across multiple fronts: from reestablishing ties to territory amid displacement and migrant detention, to revitalizing Indigenous languages and water relations in the face of environmental degradation and pollution. This work asks: how might we reorient ourselves within territory to understand interdependence and its entanglement to struggles beyond this moment of urgency? How do communities sustain relationships with waters that have been devastated, and what forms of collective life emerge through, and despite, these conditions of crisis?

This presentation compares two periods in the 20th century emergence of Native American and American Indian Studies with the state of the field in the 21st century. In reference to Stuart Hall’s 1983 lecture “For a Marxism without Guarantees," the title of the presentation is a gesture to the always uncertain terrain of theorizing the present, an urgent task that asks us to engage with the political legacies and commitments of Native American and Indigenous Studies while continually interrogating conditions not of our choosing. Returning to historical conjectures in the late 1960s/early 1970s and the 1990s prompts consideration of how scholarship in Native Studies has and can respond to institutional changes in the context of larger political currents, whether Red Power, Third World struggle, multicultural liberalism, 21st century decolonization, or the backlash of white grievance during rising authoritarianism. I draw from the 1969 Alcatraz Proclamation, transcripts of the 1970 Convocation of American Indian Scholars, the writings of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, as well as personal accounts of teaching across both public and private institutions to consider who Native Studies addresses within and outside the university to enact transformative intellectual projects.

Drawing on Afro-Indigenous scholar Kyle T. Mays’s call to develop the limited scholarship on Indigenous hip hop and the ways Indigeneity operates within hip hop culture, I examine how Quechua rappers from the Andes and its diasporas mobilize hip hop as a form of edutainment and decolonizing practice. Through lyrical analysis, ethnographic research, oral history interviews, and my long-term engagement with Andean musical traditions, I explore how these artists challenge multiple forms of colonialism, racism, state violence, and heteropatriarchy while cultivating politically conscious forms of education through hip hop culture. I argue that Indigenous hip hop disrupts what Mapuche scholar Luis Cárcamo-Huechante calls “acoustic colonialism” and “colonial ear” by fusing rap with Andean musical roots and foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies and histories of resistance. Following Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, I approach decolonization not as abstract theory but as an everyday practice of survival, creativity, and struggle, showing how Indigenous artists stand at the forefront of decolonizing praxis. The talk reflects on my personal trajectory into this research and its pedagogical applications in classrooms and community workshops. It concludes with a short musical performance on my ten-string quru guitarra from my native Ayacucho, tracing the sonic roots that contemporary Indigenous hip hop continues to transform.

his presentation offers a personal reflection on the evolving relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations, through the journey of Mirian Masaquiza Jerez, a Kichwa woman from Ecuador. As one of the founding staff members of the Secretariat that serves the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), Mirian shares how the Forum has grown into a strong and influential platform for Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Drawing from more than two decades within the UN system, she highlights milestones in Indigenous advocacy, including the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the recognition of Indigenous women’s rights through CEDAW General Recommendation No. 39, and the growing presence of Indigenous voices in global policy spaces. Through storytelling and reflection, the presentation explores the role of Indigenous women in shaping international agendas, the challenges of navigating institutional barriers, and the importance of meaningful participation in decision-making processes. It also calls for safeguarding hard-won spaces and addressing ongoing threats — from UN reforms to extractive industries and structural exclusion — emphasizing the transformative potential of global governance when Indigenous Peoples’ voices are at the center.

In the late 1970s, motivated by their dire situation and local struggles, and inspired by worldwide movements for social justice and decolonization, including the American civil rights movement, Indigenous Peoples around the world got together and began to organize at the international level. Although each defined itself by its relation to a unique land, culture, and often language, Indigenous Peoples from around the world made an extraordinary leap, using a common conceptual vocabulary and addressing international bodies that until then had barely recognized their existence. At the intersection of politics, law, and culture, this book documents the visionary emergence of the international Indigenous movement, detailing its challenges and achievements, including the historic recognition of Indigenous rights through the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. The winning by Indigenous Peoples of an unprecedented kind and degree of international participation – especially at the United Nations, an institution centered on states – meant overcoming enormous institutional and political resistance. The book shows how this participation became an increasingly assertive self-expression and even an exercise of self-determination by which Indigenous Peoples could both benefit from and contribute to the international community overall – now, crucially, by sharing their knowledge about climate change, their approaches to development and well-being, and their struggles against the impact of extractive industries on their lands and resources. Written by the former Chief of the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, this book will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, advocates, practitioners, and others with interests in Indigenous legal and political issues.