Profressor Mishuana Goeman examines the ways in which art and poetic practices can re-vision our spaces and provide new anti-colonial tools. Rethinking colonial spatial philosophies must include our mind’s eye so that we can reimagine a just world. Settler environmental control is often invisible in its scaffolding of power—by revisioning, we expose its superstructure, and hopefully build new sightlines which account for colonial and racial injustice. Here, Goeman will explore the work of video poems, or “poemeos”, as Heid Erdrich calls them, and speak to the various role of artist and poets to create new avenues that structure healthier relationships.

Speaker

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is currently a Professor of Indigenous Studies on leave from UCLA’s Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School at UCLA. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World (University of Nebraska Press). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021). Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as Co-PI on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities. Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA.

She is the PI of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the new Mukurtu California Native Hub housed at AISC through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She also publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the Inaugural Special Advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. From 2020-2021 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University at Buffalo, located in her home territories.