Teaching Indigeneity: Lessons from Tovaangar, Oceania, and Beyond

On 16 June 2022, Chancellor Gene D. Block of the University of California at Los Angeles (Tovaangar) issued a statement about the Native American and Pacific Islander Bruins Rising Initiative. Specifically, he endorsed the initiative’s goals to “promote lasting change, deepen our support for UCLA’s Native American and Pacific Islander communities, and positively impact our campus.” The university now intends to hire at least eight Native American and Pacific Islander faculty by the 2028-29 academic year, establish new resource centers for Native American and Pacific Islander students, and advance equitable salaries and professional opportunities for Native American and Pacific Islander staff. How did the Native American and Pacific Islander students, staff, and faculty at UCLA come together to imagine, debate, and implement this university-wide initiative? How does their initiative reflect broader efforts to teach indigeneity, an analytic and method premised on Indigenous understandings of people, place, and power worldwide? In this talk, I offer two points of comparison – one about a digital humanities project and one about a community-based summer program – as a way to trace one genealogy of this initiative. Throughout the process, I reflect on the significance of Native American and Pacific Islander pedagogies that foster compassion, inspire imagination, generate solidarity, advance interdisciplinarity, and invite criticism in Tovaangar, Oceania, and beyond.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Professor Keith L. Camacho received his interdisciplinary training in anthropology, literature, and history at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He has also held research appointments in indigenous studies at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As an historian of Chamorros and other Pacific Islanders, he has published widely on empire, gender, militarism, race, and sovereignty in the Mariana Islands, Oceania, and the broader Asia-Pacific region. His new research agenda extends these issues to the sphere of U.S. colonial law and to its imperial regimes of freedom, punishment, and surveillance in the Pacific.

CONTACT

Email Dr Kalissa Alexeyeff (k.alexeyeff@unimelb.edu.au) with any questions about the event.

Light lunch to follow seminar.

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Cover image credit: Nicholas Ismael Martinez / University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA / Unsplash.com