Events

Place-names encode a way of seeing, understanding, and relating to the land. They inscribe our social values on official maps for the future generations. Like the movement to topple Confederate and colonial statues, renaming campaigns demonstrate how oppressive word-monuments–as symbols of extraction, erasure, and enclosure–can be replaced and reclaimed as life-affirming sites for cultural resurgence and #landback.

The broader community has a lot to learn from the Coast Salish peoples, and a lot to gain by collaborating with them in efforts to protect and restore the Salish Sea. This panel convenes people who have undertaken cross-cultural collaborations in tribal government, environmental design, activism & cultural interpretation to ask how can we build the capacity for difficult conversations, healing and reciprocity, and collaborative processes. 

The confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers in the Grand Canyon has been a place of deep cultural significance since time immemorial for 11 associated tribes. In this #RedRoadtoDC “virtual journey” event, we will hear from Diné families who are working to stop three proposed hydroelectric dams that threaten tribal sovereignty and sacred cultural and historic sites.

The Badger-Two Medicine is the sacred homeland of the Blackfeet Nation. It is home to their creation story, and has been a place of refuge and healing for 10,000 years. This virtual event will tell the story of the Badger-Two Medicine and the decades-long struggle to protect it, not only as an important wildlife sanctuary, but also as an intermediary to Blackfeet spiritual power.

From the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Bears Ears National Monument, sacred Indigenous lands across the country are in the sightlines of oil companies, whose relentless pursuit of new oil and gas reserves endanger the traditions, ways of life, and religious practices of local communities.