YGSNA Members Attend Newberry NCAIS Graduate Conference
In February Professor Tarren Andrews and other YGSNA members attended the 2023 Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (NCAIS) Graduate Student Conference in Chicago at the Newberry Library. The five graduate students who attended were also invited to present their research in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. These students included Natasha Myhal, Sandra Sánchez, Joshua Friedlein, Manon Guadet, and Emily Velez Nelms.
Sandra Sánchez is a Ph.D. candidate working within the fields of Native Studies and Immigration History. Sandra presented work from their dissertation on challenges to U.S. immigration policy and citizenship laws by Native people living along the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico border in the 20th century. Sandra was on a panel that considered intersections of violence across law and literature bringing together a conversation on deportation and settler colonial borders.
This was Sandra’s first time attending the conference. Reflecting on their experience, Sandra noted, “The conference was a wonderful experience to be surrounded by Native scholars and was the first time since the pandemic I’d been able to be engaged in my direct field of study and with like-minded peers. Beyond listening to great panels and presenting my own work, I was grateful to hear from Prof. Doug Kiel and Prof. Teresa Montoya who helped curate the exhibit, ‘Native Truths’ at the Field Museum, and who modeled conscientious and public-facing work in Indigenous Studies.”
Natasha Myhal, the 2022/2023 Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder with an emphasis on Native American and Indigenous Studies. Natasha’s dissertation uses Indigenous studies and anthropological approaches to understand how climate change impacts Odawa-nmé (lake sturgeon) relationships and how Anishinaabe ways of knowing, such as bimaadiziwin (living well), can unify and restore balance to their non-human relatives. Her research calls attention to Indigenous restoration programs—in all their complex social, political, and scientific realms—as key sources for formulating responses to climate change.
In her presentation at the conference, “The Political Life of Nmé: Tracing Relational Wellbeing in Place,” Natasha discussed a paper from the 3rd chapter of her dissertation. Sharing her thoughts on the session, Natasha said, “All the participants considered themes that take up relationships to the non-human world, through practices such as land cultivation, centering Indigenous perspectives of space, and the ecological entanglements between “foreign” environments, and “native” environments.” She also mentioned that her panel was particularly strong with the applicability of archive materials for Indigenous communities.
Manon Gaudet is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate studying 19th and 20th-century North American Art, with a particular interest in the ongoing impacts of settler-colonialism and intercultural exchange. Her dissertation critically examines how a land-based, property logic permeates twentieth-century visual culture and how settler artists and designers upheld and visually reproduced the dispossession of Indigenous land. Manon’s presentation at the conference was titled “Native Clays and Indigenous Bodies: American Art Pottery, Ethnographic Photography, and White Possession at the Turn of the 20th Century.”
Joshua Friedlein is a graduate student at the Yale School of Environment, and his presentation at the conference was titled “Reviving Allotment in the #Landback Era: A Theory of Neo-Liberal Allotment Policy through Artificial, Spatial, and Temporal Enclosures”.
Emily Velez Nelms is a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture, and her presentation at the conference was titled “Domestic Exotic/Dispossession and Desire in South Florida 20th Century Tourism”.
