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4th Hampshire College Native Crossroads Festival and the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Symposium present:
4th Hampshire College Native Crossroads Festival and the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Symposium present:
Re-membering into Kinship: Unlearning Settler Ways
Friday, May 1, 2026| 10 AM - 5:30 PM| Franklin Patterson Hall
A joint offering from the Hampshire College Decolonization & Reciprocity Working Group and the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, Re-membering into Kinship: Unlearning Settler Ways is an transdisciplinary exploration that brings together educators, scholars, students, organizers, youth, and community members committed to reimagining education beyond colonial impositions.
Grounded in Indigenous perspectives on relationality, reciprocity, and place-based and community-embedded pedagogy, the symposium invites participants to critically examine how settler colonial logics shape our institutions, pedagogies, and everyday ways of knowing. Through dialogue, storytelling, and collective praxis, the gathering aims to center the work of unlearning, unsettling, and subverting the extractive, individualistic, hierarchical, and cisheteropatriarchal modes of thought demanded of settler futurity and colonial schooling.
At the same time, we hope the symposium will also serve as a site for the resurgence and embodiment of practices that honor kinship, responsibility, and interdependence, believing that such experiences are worth actuating even if they are temporary and fleeting. Together, we ask what it means to remember otherwise, and how education might become a site of abolition, resurgence, and anti-colonial agency.
Full Program and Schedule Coming Soon
Full Program and Schedule Coming Soon
10 AM - 4 PM | Native Crossroads Vendors & Artists | FPH Courtyard
10 AM - 10:15 AM | Opening Remarks
FPH West Lecture Hall
Justin Beatty (Ojibwe, Saponi, African American)
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM | Concurrent Workshops
Launched in November 2023, the PeaceBirds Project grew out of the shared desire of two artist friends, Mona Shiber and JuPong Lin, to transform the agony of witnessing atrocities committed in the Levant, West Asia and around the world. The project links the history of our people’s struggle for sovereignty through art-centered gatherings and traveling installations that cultivate spaces for collective grief and creative activism.
In this workshop we embrace an inquiry into the theme of “remembering into kinship” and “re-membering otherwise” in embodied collective praxis. We center interdependence or co-becoming in family stories of flight, migration and cultural reclamation in diaspora. We explore embodied acts of abolition and resistance against the extractive, hyper-individualistic, nation-building paradigm of colonialism. We will fold paper, move our bodies, and vocalize how to shift this dominating paradigm through creative activism. What do we need to unlearn to make space for a resurgence of kincentric worlds?
Shifting from Extraction to Co-Creation: Lessons from Drones and Mapping in Place-Based Learning, Kala’i Ellis, Spatial Analysis Lab at Smith College | FPH East Lecture Hall
In a two-part workshop, Ellis will guide our mapping of origins and migratory pathways of the knowledges that symposium participants come with, and following this first collective exercise, we will learn from him how we can use drones in order to foster anticolonial relationships. Join this space for sharing stories about utilizing drones and colonial technology to empower indigenous communities, gain exposure to free software and tools to make your own digital maps, and to consider the engineering of 21st century technologies for just futures.
11:15 AM -11:30 AM | Break
11:30 - 12:15 | Native Curators and Librarians | FPH West Lecture Hall
Moderator: N.C. Christopher Couch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Native Curators and Librarians: Heather Bruegl, Brandon Castle, Isabel Espinal
12:15 - 1 PM | Break
1 PM - 1:45 PM | Native American and Indigenous Studies Alum Panel | FPH West Lecture Hall
Moderator: Anjali D’Souza, Smith College
Native American and Indigenous Studies Alum Panel
Sage Innerarity, Emma Cape, and Qadira Locke
1:45 PM - 2:05 PM | Break
2:05 PM - 2:45 PM | Living Past the Goodbyes: Honoring and Thanking | FPH West Lecture Hall
Bring your favorite memory of Hampshire- a poem, a photo, a paper, a song. Be ready to share during our workshop in a circle. While the facilitator isn’t a LICSW, she does give space for all to be heard. We’ll say goodbye and thank you in all of our languages and take a group photo before leaving the campus.
2:45 PM - 3 PM | Break
3 PM - 3:45 PM | How Indigeneity Co-constitutes Modernity: A Book Roundtable
Manuela Picq, Amherst College
Noah Romero, Hampshire College
Marco Avilés, Mount Holyoke College
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM | Youth Programming | FPH Outdoor Classroom
Evan Tipton (with assistance from Whitney Byington, June Christman, and Afia Farooki)
We are so excited to provide free childcare and kids programming at Native Crossroads this year! There will be a series of three activities, which you can drop your kid off for any or all of while you attend other events!
These will include a Birchbark Etching Lesson from 3:30pm to 4:30pm, Storytime from 4:30pm to 5:00pm, and Free Play from 5pm to 5:30pm. Please find more details and sign up in advance here! This guarantees we have space for your child, but you are also welcome to show up on the day of and see if we have space.
3:45 PM - 4:45 PM | Keynote: “Inter-Imperial Intimacies: Indigenous Ainu People, Archival Kinship, and Return”
Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Distinguished Lecture
Danika Medak-Saltzman (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)
Assistant Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies
Syracuse University
FPH West Lecture Hall
4:45 PM - 5 PM | Closing Ceremony | FPH West Lecture Hall
Justin Beatty (Ojibwe, Saponi, African American)
FPH West Lecture Hall
Acknowledgments
Hampshire College Decolonization and Reciprocity Working Group
Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Program
Five Colleges, Inc.
Amherst College, Department of American Studies
Amherst College, English Department
Smith College Botanic Garden
Sustainable Hampshire
The Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science
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