Join the UCSB

American Indian & Indigenous Collective's (AIIC)

7th Annual Symposium

The Body as Archive

When: Friday through Sunday, February 21-23, 2020

Where: Friday 2/21 in the McCune Conference Center in 6060 HSSB. Saturday 2/22 and Sunday 2/23 will be in UCSB Student Resource Building, Multi-Purpose Room

UC Santa Barbara campus

(Please click on above links for campus maps.)

The Body as Archive

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

“When my body is the archive, the archives become flesh and blood with a salty

genealogy, a

hunger for truth, a weariness of the bones –

and you understand at last:

the archive was never inanimate

the archive was never dead

the archive

was never

yours.”

-- Deborah Miranda, excerpt from “When My Body Is the Archive”

The 7^th annual American and Indian and Indigenous Collective Symposium planning committee seeks papers that explore the body and the body in community as archives. In her words, Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen and Chumash poet and scholar, Deborah Miranda inspires us to think about Indigenous and Native bodies as archives. To this conception of the living, embodied archive, we bring questions about the histories of blood: traditional intimacies, quantum confidences and cruelties, and “full-blood” as a cultural and inter-and intra-tribal and familial terms. The sinews of history and trauma and “survivance” (Vizenor) include spatial knowledge, exile from homelands, coming home, storytelling, educational violence, indigeneity, decolonizing relationships to controlling institutions. There are skins and muscle memory that contains knowledge and are deeply engaged in cultural wellness and recovery through vitalizations and revitalizations, building the tomol, the canoes and the many boats, paddling and steering through what it means to be alive. We embrace non-literal-time and place-based understandings that respect embodied relationships to ways of knowing and the earth.

Friends, we write from a university aware that the archiving of Native and Indigenous Peoples and culture has been foundational to academic disciplines such as anthropology and sociologies intent on “the civilizing process” measured through hagiographic scripts of modernization and progress. From policy-perspectives, this has been active engagement in repatriation, cultural owning, and the troubling history and dangers of property law. Indigenous notions of archiving often do not rely on the preservation of collated and collected types of objects extracted from community. How do Indigenous Peoples consciously and unconsciously archive their traditions, stories that seek and/or resists or incorporate practices in ways that are not focused on legibility, in ways that have not been contained by institutionalized and codifying practices of knowledge and structures of settler colonial history? In embodied memory, trauma, and place-based knowing, form itself embodies critique and renewed way of making. We welcome papers and/or visual critiques or varieties of performance (dance, open chant, rap) to realize the body and the body in community as an archive for raising and sharing awareness.

“The Body as Archive” is 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). 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, and physics. Honoring the embodied wisdom and survivance of our elders, we invite papers and offerings of art from Native scholars and communities poised to address such questions as: When the body is archive, what are ways of knowing? How might our communities use the historical archives and collections for our own purposes? What additional ways might they facilitate language awakening and other forms of cultural vitalization? Acknowledging the body as embodied archive, how is respect and the protocol of respect entwined with everyday life, ceremonial life? “The Body as Archive” is grounded in the aspirational and healing work of engaging the future of Native and Indigenous communities.