Why Indigenous Land Back is a Feminist Issue

In the context of global climate catastrophe, Indigenous land reclamation and land defense movements constitute a powerful effort to halt the destruction of Earth’s remaining natural resources. Indigenous women and Two Spirit people are at the forefront of the fight to protect and reclaim Indigenous homelands. In this online event, our panelists will discuss the relationship between gender violence and the dispossession of Indigenous lands, the politics of gender in Indigenous land reclamation, and why Land Back is a feminist issue.

Hosted by the Clayman Institute at Stanford University

Speakers Include:

Cutcha Risling Baldy, associate professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, environmental justice, Indigenous natural resource management, mental health and cultural interventions, and decolonization. She is the co-director of the NAS Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute and co-investigator on an NSF INCLUDES Planning Grant for inclusive STEM pedagogy for Native American students at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her book: We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-age Ceremonies received “Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies” at the 2019 Native American Indigenous Studies Association Conference. She is Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe.

Corrina Gould, tribal chair for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation, was born and raised in the village of Huichin, now known as Oakland, Calif. She is the co-founder and lead organizer for Indian People Organizing for Change, a small Native-run organization, and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led organization within her ancestral territory. Through the practices of rematriation, cultural revitalization, and land restoration, the Land Trust calls on Native and non-Native peoples to heal and transform legacies of colonization and genocide, and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.

Laura Harjo is a Muscogee (Creek) scholar, award-winning author, Indigenous planner, and teacher. She is an associate professor and the previous interim chair in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Emory University. Her scholarly inquiry focuses on “community.” Harjo’s research and teaching centers on three areas: (1) spatial storytelling, (2) anti-violence-informed Indigenous architecture and community planning, and (3) community-based knowledge production. These three areas of inquiry support a larger project of Indigenous futurity. Harjo’s book Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019) employs Muscogee epistemologies and Indigenous feminisms to offer a community-based practice of futurity. Her book won the 2020 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Monograph and the 2021 On the Brinck Book Award + Lecture.  

Moderator: Caitlin “Katie” Keliiaa is an assistant professor of history at UC Santa Cruz. She is an Indigenous feminist historian specializing in 20th century Native experiences in the West. Her scholarship engages Indian labor exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance of Native bodies, especially in Native Californian contexts. Her forthcoming book examines how Native women domestic workers negotiated and challenged an early 20th century Indian labor program based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this work, Keliiaa centers Native women’s voices uncovered from federal archives. She is Yerington Paiute and Washoe, and her tribal communities inform her scholarship.