Title: Collective Mental Models for Good Human-Earth Relations: The Case of Tribal Nation and Indigenous Scientists in STEM Graduate Education
Date/Time: Wednesday, February 26, 10-11AM, Pacific Time
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Abstract: Indigenous students remain vastly underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate programs. Simultaneously, Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities throughout the Americas and elsewhere work to protect their rights and relationships with land and their more-than-human kin. From pragmatic constructions of natural resources to rethinking good human and earth relations, community members who hold Indigenous Knowledges are place-rooted learners and teachers of their Tribal environments as well as vital would-be scientists who debate and balance multiple epistemologies and methodologies towards protection and care of their places. In this presentation, an Ojibwe biologist and a land-based educational researcher discuss our work to prepare university partners to develop new mental models of good human and earth relations. In doing so, we position Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples as central rights-holders and actors in this work and its immediate and long-range impacts.
Speakers:
Stephen J. Smith (Steve) earned his dual undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry from Concordia University, M.S. in Biology from Bemidji State University, and a second M.S. in Chemistry from the College of St. Scholastica. His Ph.D. dissertation research in Conservation Sciences in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources (CFANS) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, focuses on climate change and adaptation, invasive species, and aquatic plants, specifically the impacts of the invasive species starry stonewort on natural stands of wild rice. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was a STEM faculty member at Leech Lake Tribal College for nearly a decade, and he also served as the Director of the environmental lab for MCT (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) comprised of six Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota. He is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and was raised and lived on Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe his entire life before attending his Ph.D. program.
Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman is Wanka/Quechua from Peru with strong genealogical family and direct community ties across the Tawantinsuyo (four quarters of Inka lands), and specifically the regions of Junín, Huancavelica, and Cusco. She is Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and studies the relationship between Indigenous lands, cultural practices, and in and out-of-school learning with Indigenous communities and Tribal institutions in the Americas. Centering Indigenous knowledge systems, her work is situated in three areas—the interfaces between modernity, development, and Indigenous places; Indigenous community-based educational design and generative environmental pedagogies; and Indigenous and comparative frameworks and enactments of decolonial rights. As an Andean Indigenous scholar, her goal is to advance Quechua research methodologies, and she writes about these processes in fellowship with other Indigenous methodologists worldwide.