In this seminar, we examine the historical processes which help create and conflate concepts like Indigeneity and race, and migration and diasporas. Speakers will present for 10-15 minutes followed by a roundtable discussion with participants.
Zoom Registration
Amber Starks will present “The Disenfranchising of Black Indigeneity from Global Indigeneity”
Amber will discuss the disenfranchisement of Blackness from Indigeneity as an attempt to render those racialized as Black (globally) incapable, even ineligible of being connected to land and place. She will explore how excluding Blackness from Indigeneity is also an attempt at dehumanizing Blackness and deeming it unqualified to relate to the Land, thereby voiding any legitimate claims of stewardship and of belonging. Ultimately, this racialized dispossession is in pursuit of negating any ancestral ties that can or do exist between Blackness and the Land in an effort to legitimize the attempted domestication and exploitation of both Black Indigenous peoples of the world and the Land!
Tyler Tully will present “Chickasaw Mission Schools in Red, white, and Black”
With the passing of the Civilization Act Fund of 1819, the U.S. federal government and Protestant missionary societies aligned to radically reorient Chickasaw relationships with place at boarding schools within their national borders in what are now the states of Mississippi and Alabama.
Amber Starks (aka Melanin Mvskoke) is an Afro Indigenous (African-American and Native
American) advocate, organizer, cultural critic, decolonial theorist, and budding abolitionist.
She is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and is also of Shawnee, Yuchi, Quapaw, and Cherokee descent.
Her passion is the intersection of Black and Native American identity. Her activism seeks to normalize, affirm, and uplift the multidimensional identities of Black and Native peoples through discourse and advocacy around anti-Blackness, abolishing blood quantum, Black liberation, and Indigenous sovereignty.
She hopes to encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from compartmentalizing struggles. She ultimately believes the partnerships between Black and Indigenous peoples (and all POC) will aid in the dismantling of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and settler colonialism, globally.
She earned a Bachelor’s of Science in General Science (emphasis in Biology and Anthropology) from the University of Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Her pronouns are she/her.
Tyler M. Tully is a doctoral candidate and the Arthur Peacocke Graduate Scholar in Theology and Science at Oxford University.
As a fifth-generation Oklahoman of settler and Chickasaw descent, Tully’s interdisciplinary research and teaching engages the material and embodied relationships between religion, settler colonialism, and knowledge production in what is now the Southeastern United States.