Native Feminisms

Centering American Indian and Indigenous Land and People

“What if we were to (re)write the map?”

“Implementing Native feminist critiques and conceptions of space ... will uproot colonial discourses. Native scholarship will put into practice cultural spatial narrations that mend rifts rather than exacerbate the colonial divides. A Native feminist spatial practice critically examines its own positioning and moves us toward destroying Western schemas that hold patriarchy in place.”

-- Mishuana Goeman

The Eighth Annual AIIC Symposium, “Native Feminisms: Centering American Indian and Indigenous Land and People,” seeks to focus Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, trans, non-binary, and two spirit people. As Mishuana Goeman shows, drawing attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality foregrounds relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as methods of knowledge creation. Relevant topics to broader discussions of Native feminisms include: embodiment, futurity, spatiality, memory, trauma, ecological relationality, community knowledge, emergence, collective power, ceremony, decolonization, education, reclamation, and felt theory.

Heteropatriarchy, the gender binary, and gender and sexual conformity have long been weaponized against Indigenous peoples as a tool of historical and ongoing colonialism. It cannot be assumed that Indigenous cultures are heteropatriarchal, accept a gender binary, or are homophobic -- such assumptions are rooted in the patriarchal and homophobic perspectives of academics or other cultural commentators. Rather, many Indigenous cultures normalize and privilege matriarchy, different gender-queer, and LGBTQIA+ identities. Colonizers fixate on Native women’s sexuality and objectify and exoticize Native women and girls, even to the point of commodification. Native women have endured and survived forced sterilization, including the obsessed tracking of their menstrual cycles in residential schools. The current pandemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two spirit people (#MMIW) is but one example of the targeted gendered violence colonialism perpetuates. This CFP asks in what ways Indigenous cultures, politics, spiritualities, and lifeworlds are different from heteropatriarchal, masculinist, and colonial Western traditions? What knowledge is produced by and through a recentering of Native women, girls, two spirit, and LGBTQIA+ perspectives, lived experiences, and knowledge creation?

The AIIC seeks papers that explore how Native feminist cartographies help us remap and reimagine the relationship between people, kin, communities, temporality, and the land. We hope to raise questions about public space and protest, environment and ecological knowledge, storytelling, violence, education, Indigeneity, decolonial thinking, gender, and multiraciality. We embrace non-linear, relational understandings of time, and so we invite papers that address historical issues of cartography, contemporary remappings, and embodied relationships to history, knowledge creation, and the land, as well as the intersection of such topics.

Furthermore, we welcome papers and/or alternate visual critiques or performances that interrogate and realize Native feminisms in all forms. As an interdisciplinary conference, we seek individual papers, panels, and performances from across the academy: the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and hard sciences with particular attention paid to Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). As such, we welcome contributions from multiple fields, including but not limited to history, linguistics, literature, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, theatre, music, dance, visual art, biology, ecology, chemistry, physics, and beyond. Honoring the wisdom of our elders, we invite papers and performances from Native communities poised to address such questions as: How can communities use ideas stemming from Native feminisms for their own purposes, such as to facilitate community relations and cultural revitalization? How might practices of respect and protocol be entwined with everyday life, ceremonial life, and in remembering the future of the past?

This year, the AIIC Symposium has the honor of featuring the following keynote speakers who address issues related to Native feminisms: Mishuana Goeman and Laura Harjo.

Submission Instructions:

The symposium is intended for students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty/staff, and community members.

To submit: Please send an abstract of 250-300 words and a one-page CV to ucsb.aiic.symposium.cfp@gmail.com.

Extended deadline: Wednesday, January 27, 2021.

When you submit, please include a line in your submission that states: AIIC Symposium, and the category of your submission (graduate, undergrad, community member, etc.). Thank you.