"Looking for Indians: Indigenous People and the Environment" Learning Community Coordinators: Margaret Bruchac and Susan Lyons

The University of Connecticut at Avery Point is offering students a unique opportunity to explore their interest in a specific topic from different perspectives. For the fall semester of 2009 and spring semester of 2010, a group of students and faculty will be participating in a new interdisciplinary Learning Community focused on the topic of "Indigenous People and the Environment". Participating faculty will introduce students to different academic disciplines, various methods, and new vantage points, to better understand Indigenous peoples and contemporary issues surrounding our relations with the environment. The Learning Community will also help students adapt to campus life, build creative social and intellectual connections, acquire academic skills, explore how different college disciplines connect to each other, and learn about special minors and majors available on campus. Areas of study will include traditional ecological knowledge, representations of Native American people, natural resources and sustainability, Native literature and arts, and popular memory and local history. Field trips, lunchtime roundtable conversations, social events, Native guest speakers, and symposia will provide enjoyable and stimulating settings for learning outside the classroom.

See: http://www.averypoint.uconn.edu/avery_point/learning_community.htm

All University of Connecticut faculty and students are invited to join us for Learning Community experiences outside the classroom that will include:

* September - October: Faculty Roundtable Conversations 12:15-12:50 pm in Academic Building room 308, Avery Point campus These conversations will address the following questions: September 9: "What is an Indian?" September 23: "What is the environment?" October 7: "How do we construct environments?" October 21: "How do objects and environments construct us?"

* October 28: Symposium on Indigenous People and the Environment 7 pm at the Branford House, Avery Point campus More information to come...

* Spring 2010 Symposium on Indigeneity and the Environment More information to come...

* Spring 2010 Avery Point Campus Social Event More information to come...

METANOIA EVENT AT UCONN AVERY POINT CAMPUS

". . . In the Spirit of Annie Mae . . ." A Panel Discussion on Violence Against Native Women

Catherine Martin (Mi'kmaq) Filmmaker Aboriginal Peoples Television Network

Pamela Ellis (Natick Nipmuc) Tribal Lawyer

Tonya Gonella Frichner (Onondaga) President, American Indian Law Alliance, Representative, United Nations' Forum on Indigenous Issues

Wednesday, October 7, 7-9 pm Marine Sciences Building University of Connecticut at Avery Point

University of Connecticut 2009 Metanoia on Women & Violence With support from the Women's Studies Department, University of Connecticut, and the Women's Center of Southeastern Connecticut, Inc.

In October, 2009, the University of Connecticut is holding a series of events and discussions comprising a Metanoia, focused on the issue of women and violence. This special event at the Avery Point campus calls attention to the historical and contemporary dimensions of violence against Native American women. Violence against women is not just a contemporary phenomenon. Native American women and women of color have victimized since the colonial era. Although their status as American citizens has shifted quite dramatically over the centuries, their lives are still disproportionately affected by violence, including lateral violence, Euro-American male dominance, and reservation systems that altered indigenous structures of social organization.

The timing of the two UConn Metanoias, 30 years apart, resonates with a representative case that is not yet resolved - the 1975 murder of American Indian Movement activist Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, who was incorrectly targeted as an FBI informant, and who became the victim of her former comrades in the American Indian Movement. Over more than 30 years, despite intense investigations, this case continues to drag through the courts and through the media in the US and Canada.

Award-winning Mi'kmaq filmmaker Catherine Anne Martin will be coming to campus to show and discuss her film "The Spirit of Annie Mae." (2002, National Film Board of Canada). As a record of a troubled time in American history, it reveals the jagged edges of human rights movements with troubled gender relations, and the pathos of reservation conditions that provoked the emergence of the American Indian Movement.

Tonya Gonnella Frichner, Onondaga, who serves as North America's regional representative to the United Nations' Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and Pamela Ellis, Natick Nipmuc, a New England tribal lawyer and community activist, will join Martin to discuss the regional and national implications of violence against Native American women. They will also highlight the profound importance of kinship and tradition in Native communities as means for restorative justice and stopping the spread of cultures of violence.

NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES University of Connecticut at Avery Point For information, contact Dr. Margaret Bruchac Native American Studies Coordinator at Avery Point phone: (860) 405-9059 email: margaret.bruchac@uconn.edu

"Native American Arts: Expressions of Spirit, Identity & Connection"

Fall 2009 Native American Guest Speakers University of Connecticut at Avery Point

September 16 "Material Arts" Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag) Wednesday, 2:30-3:45pm, Academic Building 211

October 1 "Performance Arts" Dawn Spears and Cassius Spears (Narragansett) Thursday, 7-9pm, Marine Sciences 103

October 15 "Verbal Arts" Trudie Lamb Richmond (Schaghticoke) Thursday, 7-9pm, Marine Sciences 103

October 29 "Environmental Arts" Judy Dow (Abenaki) Thursday, 7-9 pm, Marine Sciences 103

NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES University of Connecticut at Avery Point For information, contact Dr. Margaret Bruchac Native American Studies Coordinator at Avery Point phone: (860) 405-9059 email: margaret.bruchac@uconn.edu

Field Schools:

Archaeological Field School in Armenian Prehistory

Program Dates: May 30 - June 30, 2009

Prehistoric Archaeology - Training in the methods and techniques of archaeological excavation and analysis at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

Program Dates: June 1 - July 10, 2009

Robert Thorson New Book

http://www.bookstore.uconn.edu/departments/events/event04.htm

Event Schedule

The tiny nation of Tuva, located between Siberia and Mongolia, is home to an unusual musical tradition known as throat singing, in which vocalists produce resonant tones from deep in their throats. The masters of this form are able to sing three or four notes at a time, in effect allowing them to harmonize with themselves. Paul Pena is an American blues singer and guitarist who has worked with the likes of Bonnie Raitt and B.B. King. One day, he heard a program of Tuvan throat singing on the radio and was immediately fascinated by this remarkable, otherworldly music. Pena began the arduous task of teaching himself to sing in the Tuvan manner, a feat all the more remarkable since he had no guide other than a handful of recordings. After several years, word of the American throat singer traveled back to Tuva, and Genghis Blues documents Pena's triumphant journey to Kyzyl, where he was invited to perform for a festival and symposium on traditional Tuvan harmonic singing. The isolation that Pena feels as a blind man is contrasted by the joyous warmth with which he is received by his Tuvan partners in music. Genghis Blues proved to be an audience favorite in screenings at the 1999 Sundance, Rotterdam and San Francisco Film Festivals.

—Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Source: New York Times Review

In 2009 the world will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, the 150th anniversary of his publication of On the Origin of Species, and the 400th anniversary of the publication of Kepler’s first two laws of planetary motion. To mark these events the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and more than 150 other organizations have declared a Year of Science 2009, a national year of engaging the public and enhancing the understanding of science.

The University of Connecticut was the first university in the country to join the Year of Science celebration.

Field School:

PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY - Training in the methods and techniques of archaeological excavation and analysis at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center- May 27 - July 3 2008

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY - At Hammondville, a 19th century Mining “Ghost Town” in the Adirondacks of Upstate NY - June 30 – July 25 2008

For more information and application contact: Dr. Kevin McBride, kevin.mcbride@uconn.edu OR Sarah Sportman, sarah.sportman@uconn.edu

Ideas and Images of Home: An Ethnographic Interpretation of Photographs by Yuendumu Youths a lecture by Yasmine Musharbash.
Earlier this year, 36 Warlpiri youths from the remote Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu in central Australia documented what is important to them by taking photographs with disposable cameras. This paper is a first analysis of these photographs, and focuses on age and gender differences and similarities on the one hand, and on youths' visual expressions of what constitutes "home"' on the other. Our speaker, Yasmine Musharbash (M.A. Freie Universität Berlin, PhD Australian National University) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia. She has extensive research experience with Warlpiri people, especially from the remote settlement of Yuendumu in Australia's Northern Territory, where she has been conducting fieldwork since 1994.

November 12, 2007 at 4:15 in the Colloquium Room.