Theresa Gregor

California Indigenous Scholar, Educator, and Leader

Keynote Address: “Aa‘a Mat Tipaay Ak’wee, Bringing Her/Voice Back to the Land: Incomplete Repatriations in The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero”

Dr. Gregor’s research focuses on California American Indian women, sovereignty, literary and cultural repatriation, and tribal cultural resiliency and revitalization. She is currently researching and co-editing two book-length projects: California Indian Women’s Lives and Contributions and LandKeeping: Restoring Fire to the Land (with Jared Aldern). Her research focuses on California American Indian women, sovereignty, literary and cultural repatriation, and tribal cultural resiliency and revitalization. The challenges that Kumeyaay and their Payomkawichum relatives in San Diego, California, USA and Baja California, Mexico experience today, are in many ways extensions or outgrowths of the root problems Delfina Cuero personally survived in 1969. Issues such as, dispossession, disenfranchisement, and the depletion of critical food and cultural resources; social inequity, racism, gender violence, and indentured servitude; as well as disputes over land use and land tenure, particularly for the Kumeyaay whom the US/Mexico border crossed, all of which still exist between Native and non-Native communities in the region.

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Harsha Walia

Activist and author of Border and Rule

Keynote Address: “Abolish Border Imperialism: Migration, Racial Capitalism and Empire”

Harsha Walia is a migrant justice activist and author whose work addresses how current migrant and refugee crises are the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change, generating mass dispossession worldwide. This talk will situate the border within a global analysis of migration, displacement, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and rising fascism globally, while emphasizing the urgent necessity of abolishing border imperialism through transnational solidarities.

Opening: Words of prayer for the keepers of the land: Val Lopez and the Indigenous Borderlands Collective

Paper Session 1: Trans-Indigenous Struggles at Borders

• Chad Allen (U of Washington), “Stars, Rivers, Seasons: Rethinking Borderlands through Indigenous Earthworks”
• Carlos Alonso Nugent (Yale Univ), “Imagined Environments in the US–Mexico–Apache Borderlands”
• Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (UCSC), “Unsettling Setter Space Wars across the Tohono O’odham Ancestral Desert and beyond”
• Amrah Salomón-Johnson (UCSB), “Indigenous Fugitivity and Refusal at the Confluence of Rivers and Nations”

Paper Session 2: Rethinking Chicanx/Mexico Borders

• Roberto Hernandez (SDSU), “De-Indigenization and the Epistemic and Cartographic Prison of Modernity/Coloniality”
• Brian Klopotek (U of Oregon), “The Gulf Between Us: Teaching US Indigenous Studies in Mexico”
• Celia Herrera Rodriguez (UCSB) & Susy Zepeda (UCD), “Xicana/x Indigena Futures: Re-rooting through Traditional Medicines”

Paper Session 3: Indigenous Movements against Settler Spaces, Law and Carcerality

• Renya Ramirez (UCSC), “Native Women of the Alcatraz Occupation: Big Rock School and Remaking Carceral Space into Decolonial Space”
• Leti Volpp (UCB), “Border Law, Criminality and Indigenous Sovereignty”
• Maylei Blackwell (UCLA), “Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Activism”

Paper Session 4: Indigenous Homelands

• Val Lopez (Amah Mutsun tribal band) and Beth Haas (UCSC emeritus), “California Missions from an Amah Mutsun perspective”
• David Martinez (AZ State Univ), “Elder Brother’s Divided Home: An Indigenous Perspective on US-Mexico Border Relations”
• Fantasia Painter (UCI), “Emplacing the U.S.-Mexico Border in Indigenous Worlds, Notes from O’odham Jeved”

The Indigenous Borderlands Collective