Call For Presentations

"Nuances such as the types of wares or processes of fermenting and consuming are employed to create distinct accounts of community histories [among Indigenous communities in Northeast India] including gender relations and social practices. These accounts offer us insights about indigenous skills and knowledge.”

– Dolly Kikon (Lotha Naga)

 “Climate justice is another issue that’s being addressed in fiction right now. I don’t mean that stories are simply talking about climate change, but that the stories themselves become forms of climate justice.”

– Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe)

“EJ [Environmental Justice] for Indigenous peoples … must be capable of a political scale beyond the homogenizing, assimilationist, capitalist State. It must conform to a model that can frame issues in terms of their colonial condition and can affirm decolonization as a potential framework within which environmental justice can be made available.”

– Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant)

The Ninth Annual American Indian and Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, Imagining Indigenous Futurities, is an interdisciplinary conference, calling for individual papers, performances, or panel proposals, from across the academy – including from the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and sciences – and from community members and practitioners beyond academic borders. We are asking participants: “What is most urgent for our communities now?” In asking this, the symposium aims to advance conversations at the intersections of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK); Indigenous Futurities; storytelling; environmental justice; and, landback and/or land and water protection. In selecting this year’s theme, Imagining Indigenous Futurities, the AIIC seeks presentations that center: global Indigenous people’s lifeways, ecologies, and knowledges; ITEK; practices and theories for enacting just, decolonial, and sustainable futures; Native feminist, Indigiqueer, and Two Spirit knowledge creation, storytelling, and organizing; Landback movements; and, Native storytelling as a form of resistance, survivance, and theorizing. How are our communities envisioning and enacting lush futures in the now for all our human and more-than-human relations? 

We intend to explore these topics in expansive and inclusive ways; contributions may undergird, expand on, or complicate any of the symposium topics, individually or collectively. We welcome contributions from multiple fields, including but not limited to history, linguistics, literature, ethnic studies, religious studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology, law, theater, music, dance, visual art, biology, ecology, chemistry, and physics. Honoring the embodied wisdom and survivance of our elders, we invite papers and offerings of art from Native scholars and community members poised to address such questions as:

• How are local traditional ecologies and knowledges being practiced in our communities? 

• What are the theoretical and practical applications of ITEK to inspire, create, and enable us to inhabit just and sustainable futures seeded in the past and enacted in the present?

• What role does ITEK play in combating ongoing colonization, extractive capitalism, land grabbing, and military occupation? We are especially interested in presentations about environmental justice in an Indigenous context, land and water protection, the relationship between environmental justice and decolonization, and presentations that focus on landback movements.

• How are the arts, literatures, and performative relationality of Indigenous peoples addressing the climate crisis by enacting change, transformation, or renewal? 

• What is the role of ITEK in global Indigenous alliances and futures? How can we facilitate global Indigenous solidarities and the sharing of research, knowledges, and agendas? 

• How can Native feminist, Indigiqueer, and Two Spirit scholarship shed light on important work toward a future without colonial gender-based and/or sexual violence?

• How can/does ITEK shape belonging and identity within and among Indigenous communities? How have the different ways legal constructions of identities, and blood racialization (i.e., colonial imposition of blood quantum) undermined Indigenous and Native American claims to land and sovereignty? 

• How can/does the practice of imagining futurities shape belonging and identity within and among Indigenous communities (urban, rural, kinship, groupings of extended relations, social and activist organizations)? 

This year, the AIIC Symposium has the honor of featuring the following keynote speakers whose research addresses issues related to Indigenous Futurities, ITEK, and Indigenous environmental justice: Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe), Dolly Kikon (Lotha Naga), and Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes descendant).