YGSNA Members Attend NAISA 2025

In June, YGSNA members as well as staff from the NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project attended the annual conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) in Oklahoma City. The Sovereignty Project set up a booth to share information about the Project and YGSNA’s initiatives. Over the three-day conference, Yale faculty, graduate students, and alumni visited the booth, presented their research, and joined roundtable discussions. 

 

Their contributions reflected the multidisciplinary nature of Native American and Indigenous Studies and revealed new areas of inquiry. YGNSA members presented on 19th-century Afro-Native intellectualism, Cherokee political and economic history, Indigenous oceanic art, and global connections in the origins of settler colonialism, among other topics. 

 

At a variety of events, YGSNA members connected with scholars in their subfields. Noah Ramage, a postdoctoral associate in History, attended a preconference session that convened scholars of the Five Tribes. He reflected, “I was really impressed by everyone’s level of enthusiasm and dedication to the field. There was a great conversation about how everyone could collaborate more… to make better syllabi for those interested in working on the Five Tribes.” 

 

Later, Ramage presented a paper entitled “How 19th Century Cherokees Responded to the Depreciation of Their Currency.” He contended that Cherokee lawmakers resolved a financial crisis in the late 1870s by “dramatically altering the country’s relationship with foreign labor, foreign capital, and foreign markets.”

 

 

Assistant Professor of English Lloyd Sy enjoyed learning from other early-career academics. “NAISA is a wonderful opportunity to meet people who are doing work that is just being recognized,” he noted. “It’s so cool to see the field thriving, and to see older generations take great care of us.” 

 

Alani Fujii, a doctoral candidate in American Studies, presented her research on Black and Pasifika feminist knotting. Her audience included fellow graduate students, one of her dissertation advisors, and other noted scholars in the field. 

 

Reflecting on her experience at NAISA, Fujii shared that conversing with thinkers from across the globe “grounds me in remembering why I attend to the questions that keep me up at night.” These engagements renewed her interest in “questions [regarding] the racialization of Indigenous people – largely, understanding how power forces us to ask how racialization affects Indigenous sovereignties.” 

 

On Friday, June 27th, the Sovereignty Project hosted a dinner in Oklahoma City. At this gathering, YGSNA members and their colleagues continued the many generative conversations that began during the conference.