Native American

Honoring Native American Heritage Month with the Native American and Indigenous Alliance

Jeannine Harvey — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 13:17:44 +0000

Honoring Native American Heritage Month with the Native American and Indigenous Alliance Jeannine Harvey Sun, 11/19/2023 - 08:17

^{In 1990, a joint resolution designated November as Native American Heritage Month (NAHM), nationally recognizing what had previously been state-designated holidays. Throughout the month, Americans are encouraged to recognize and uplift the innumerable contributions, both past and present, of Indigenous people.}

��AV’s student organization Native American and Indigenous Alliance (NAIA) is dedicated to promoting Indigenous culture, raising awareness of Native issues, and providing a safe environment for Native and non-Native students. We spoke with members of NAIA to hear about how they’ve found community here at Mason and their perspectives on the importance of NAHM.

"To me, my indigenous heritage means resilience. The Taíno were the first peoples encountered by Europeans and thus the first people that were assumed to be devastated and completely annihilated. Yet at the end of the day, we still exist in various different forms. We still exist."

Richard Lopez-Perez
Puerto Rican of Taíno descent
BA in Foreign Languages, concentration in Korean

"For me, my indigenous heritage is all-encompassing. Ever since I was a kid, up until now, it's something that I've, you know, constantly been raised in and educated under. It provides a sense of community, a sense of family. Coming to Mason really helped me expand upon my sense of pride and who I am. And it gave me a greater sense of family and belonging."

Justin Gray
Piscataway and Rappahannock tribes
BS in Information Technology

"Through the Native American and Indigenous Alliance at Mason, I discovered that being indigenous can have many meanings. I was taken aback to see that I wasn't alone, and that there are other people in my similar situation who are also trying to reconnect back to their roots. As an immigrant at a young age, the alliance has helped me find community on campus, as well as further connected me to my ancestors in Peru."

Macarena De La Cruz Velasquez
Peruvian
BA in Criminology, Law and Society

"Native American Heritage Month is a time to give a voice to people that are normally voiceless. We need to listen to the indigenous community at all times, of course, but this is a time where the general public can publicly platform Indigenous people, Indigenous students, activists, artists, all of it. I think that’s why it’s a very important time of the year."

Ozcollo Espinoza
Quechua Nation; Chichimeca, and Karankawa Kadla tribes
BA in Anthropology

The importance of Native American Heritage Month is that it’s a time for us to really uplift the native community. And that isn't specific to North American natives: there's the indigenous populations in South America, Europe, Africa, and all around. This month is about uplifting all those voices. We’re here to teach people that we're not some fairy tale in a textbook: We're still here. We're present. We're a lot closer to you than what you might think. We're still here, and we're so strong.

Sara Jefferson
Chickahominy Indian Tribe of Virginia
BA in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, concentration on interpersonal dynamics

You can view the full video on our Instagram: @georgemasonu

Uplifting Indigenous voices at Mason

Counseling graduate student awarded fine arts fellowship
June 11, 2024
Mason doctoral student uses archival practice to unfold the present
December 4, 2023
Honoring Native American Heritage Month with the Native American and Indigenous Alliance
November 19, 2023
A window into the region’s past and present
October 9, 2023
The student-produced podcast The Green Tunnel just achieved a major milestone
August 23, 2023

Mason alum Kelli Jo Ford gives voice to generations of Native American women

Named to Oprah Magazine’s list of Native American Authors to Read Right Now in 2020, Mason alum Kelli Jo Ford, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is the author of Crooked Hallelujah, a “novel-in-stories that follows four generations of Cherokee women as they travel farther from their native Oklahoma.” Learn more about her.

Topics

Students

Campus News

Native American Indigenous Alliance

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Center for Mason Legacies

Native American

Mason author gives voice to generations of Native American women

Colleen Rich — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:22:28 +0000

Mason author gives voice to generations of Native American women Colleen Rich Thu, 11/16/2023 - 10:22

Despite the pandemic, it has been an amazing year for Kelli Jo Ford. In addition to being named to Oprah Magazine’s list of Native American Authors to Read Right Now, the ��AV alumna’s debut novel, “Crooked Hallelujah,” was recently named one of the best books of 2020 by Publishers Weekly and is on the longlist for the 2021 Carnegie Medal for Fiction, among other accolades.

Kelli Jo Ford. Photo by Val Ford Hancock

“Crooked Hallelujah” is a novel in stories that follows four generations of Cherokee women over five decades. Ford will be discussing her book on Friday, Nov. 6, as part of this year’s virtual Fall for the Book festival. Find out more information about the event here.

It isn’t easy to launch a book in a pandemic, but Ford has been able to find a silver lining in the many virtual book talks and readings she has given.

“My mom and aunts get to attend as many of these readings as they want,” said Ford, who graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Mason in 2007.

“And, on a normal book tour, I would have to be away from home,” she added. Home is in Richmond, Virginia, where Ford lives with her husband and fellow MFA alum, poet Scott Weaver, and their 7-year-old daughter, Cypress.

Ford, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, said she has “always been a scribbler” and wrote a lot of “really bad poetry” as a young person, but didn’t start writing seriously until her late 20s.

The first in her family to graduate from college, Ford was a student at Loyola University New Orleans when one of her teachers, author James Nolan, told her she was better at fiction. Then she found Mason’s MFA program.

Ford said that she really didn’t know a lot about getting an MFA when choosing Mason, but found what she needed here from her very first fiction workshop with Richard Bausch, who was the Heritage Professor of Writing at Mason at the time.

“[Bausch] is really good at helping students believe in themselves,” she said. “I needed that.”

Ford was looking to hone her craft, and she speaks glowingly of working with the late Alan Cheuse, who mentored her while at Mason.

“I wanted to work hard and have a critical eye,” Ford said. “Many of the lessons I learned from [Cheuse] I carry with me to this day.”

The world in “Crooked Hallelujah” is one that Ford found herself creating from that very first fiction class. In fact, the story “Bonita” dates back to her MFA days.

“I kept coming back to the same characters and places. Eventually, I realized, hey—maybe that’s because this is a book!” she said. “I tried to honor the characters and places by creating the world I was being led to create.”

“While I'm sure Kelli might often have wished for things to speed up a bit, I'm just endlessly impressed by the way she cultivated this book. She took the time to find the right form for it, made sure she found an agent who truly believed in her voice and vision, and revised and revised and revised,” said Mason English professor Scott W. Berg. “ ‘Crooked Hallelujah’ is a great book, a hard-earned nugget of pure gold, and I couldn't be happier for Kelli that it's finally out in the world and getting all this loud and well-deserved acclaim.

Topics

Alumni

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

creative writing

English Department

Native American

Mason researchers partner with Indigenous nations to promote environmental resilience

Mariam Aburdeineh — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 20:29:47 +0000

Mason researchers partner with Indigenous nations to promote environmental resilience Mariam Aburdeineh Fri, 09/02/2022 - 16:29

In This Story

Thomas Wood

It’s common to think of Indigenous peoples as living in the past. We may think of them around Thanksgiving or in old films and books. But Native Americans are very much here and now, said Jeremy Campbell, and after decades of struggle, that’s starting to be recognized.

Dancing at an Upper Mattaponi Powwow in May 2022.

In 2018, U.S. legislation granted federal recognition to six tribes in Virginia. A ��AV team has been partnering with two of them, the Upper Mattaponi and Chickahominy nations, as they embark on being sovereign nations.

“What really has been an honor to be a part of is building the capacity and the sovereignty of native tribes,” said Campbell, a College of Science professor co-leading the Mason team with School of Integrated Studies professor Tom Wood. “This is a wonderful opportunity for us, as a university, to build a sustainable and respectful relationship that has the potential to last for decades.”

Supporting Tribal Sovereignty

When tribes become sovereign nations, they must set up governments and structures to communicate with the U.S. government, said Campbell, associate director for strategic engagement at Mason’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth. That includes a department of environmental management, which both tribes are setting up.

That’s where Mason comes in.

Over the summer, Campbell and Wood led a multidisciplinary team of 10 undergraduates and two graduate researchers to collect environmental data in partnership with tribal governments as part of a Summer Impact Project. Their research will support tribes in making informed decisions for their communities when it comes to conservation, restoration, and environmental matters.

Chickahominy Connections

George Mason student Sara Jefferson is a member of the Chickahominy Tribe. Photo provided.

For junior psychology major Sara Jefferson, the project hits home.

“My favorite part about working on this project is being able to teach others about my culture and my people, while also learning about the natural world around me,” said Jefferson, a member of the Chickahominy Tribe and of Mason’s Native American and Indigenous Alliance.

Jefferson is part of three groups supporting the Chickahominy tribe in food security, wildlife assessment, and digital mapping.

“In the food security group, we’re researching the accessibility to different food sources in the surrounding Charles City area, and assisting the beginning process of community gardens within the tribe,” she said.

Jefferson is also part of a wildlife assessment group that’s identifying wildlife commonly found in the area and declining species. This involves expeditions along the Powhatan (James) River at dawn—when animals are most likely to be out—and recording where and when animals are discovered.

“This project has been very valuable to the Chickahominy Tribe, as it’s helped us establish a baseline of information about our tribal lands and waters that will help us as we make decisions going forward,” said Dana Adkins, tribal environmental director of the Chickahominy Indian Tribe. “As we work to strengthen our community’s role as stewards of our ancestral lands, it’s been great to partner with the students and learn from them as they learn from us.”

The team during a wildlife assessment. From left to right: Brian Jiménez, Olga Cheltsova, Maiya Justice, Dominique Hannon, Dana Adkins (Chickahominy Tribal Environmental Director), Dr. Tom Wood, Guadalupe Meza-Negrete.

Uncovering What Was Lost

In the wildlife assessments, the teams are also tracking what they didn’t find, such as native plant species being pushed out by invasives, Campbell said. Talking with their Indigenous partners helps them understand what the ecosystem should look like.

Collaborating with the tribes is of utmost importance for upholding tribal sovereignty, and for expanding students’ understanding.

“Leading with humility is really important, especially when you’re working with a group that’s been historically marginalized,” said senior sociology major James Condo. “Understanding that you’re going to be a student of everyone else around you is really important to keep in mind for research and in life.”

That mindset can be powerful, Campbell said, especially as the system most people are used to has ignored or marginalized Indigenous ways of knowing.

“If we connect with those ways of knowing and relationships, it can enrich our personal lives, and our ability to perceive and interact with nonhumans, and other communities, in a way that leads to more profound awareness.”

Prof. Tom Wood, Brian Jiménez and Mason team members using a spotting scope during a wildlife assessment.

Going Digital

The Mason team is also training tribal members in how to create geospatial information systems (GIS) databases. These include information about landscape changes, and air and water quality.

“We pull it into a system like ArcGIS, and overlay culturally significant points,” Campbell said. “We’re working with the tribes to train them, so that, if we’re successful, we can stand back and just stand ready for the new kinds of questions and challenges that might come up.”

Students also benefit.

“This has started to get me versed in GIS, and geospatial data is on the cutting edge of a lot of social science fields,” Condo said. “It’s really a great access point for a lot of interdisciplinary spaces.”

Mason students working with Chickahominy participants in a GIS skills building workshop.

Protecting Indigenous Data

“Tribal sovereignty is at the heart of this partnership, which is necessary and important,” said Leigh Mitchell, environmental and cultural protection director of the Upper Mattaponi Indian tribe. “Indigenous priorities have led the way in this research.”

For the Upper Mattaponi, who recently took land into trust, one of those priorities includes documenting how their landscape—which borders on the edge of urban expansion—has changed over the past 50 years, and how people are interacting with the land.

The Mason team is also constructing protocols to ensure that Indigenous people have control of their data in accordance with the principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty—the right of a tribal nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data.

“[Indigenous Data Sovereignty] encourages us to think of data as another kind of valuable resource that people need, use and care for, the way we might think of natural resources,” Campbell said. “As Virginia’s tribal nations reassert their sovereignty, it is important that their control over information pertaining to their communities, landscapes, and waterways be securely and affirmatively under their control.”

One of the team’s next steps, Campbell said, is to create a digital environment where tribes can grant tiers of access to non-native collaborators.

Research in Dialogue

Learning directly with the tribes has been a major draw, Jefferson and Condo agreed.

In addition to providing tribes with information needed to make informed environmental decisions, relationship building has been at the project’s center.

“It’s very much a dialogue,” Campbell said.

From left to right: Adam Edwards, Olga Cheltsova, James Condo, Patricia Troup, Elizabeth Schierbeek, Dr. Jeremy Campbell, Upper Mattaponi Chief Frank Adams.

Topics

Native American

Native American Indigenous Alliance

Office of Student Scholarship Creative Activities and Research (OSCAR)

Summer Impact

Mason Impact

Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE)

Sustainability

Community Partners

Campus News

Environmental Research

School of Integrative Studies

Students support tribal nation justice reform in new Mason law program

Mariam Aburdeineh — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 17:58:32 +0000

Students support tribal nation justice reform in new Mason law program Mariam Aburdeineh Wed, 03/23/2022 - 13:58

Adam Crepelle had just started law school at the time of the 2010 BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As a citizen of the United Houma Nation, a historic Native American tribe, Crepelle felt that the consequences of the spill hit home hard.

“The Houma were getting spilled on quite heavily by BP, and everyone in Louisiana was getting BP money, except the Houma Indians,” he said. “I assumed my professors would know how to solve this problem—but I quickly realized none of my professors knew anything about Indian law, and I couldn’t find anyone who practiced Indian law in Louisiana either.”

Crepelle took it upon himself to start learning Indian law, he said, and published widely on the subject. Now the assistant professor of law at ��AV is also the director of Mason’s new Tribal Law and Economics Program (TLEP), which includes a federal Indian Law course and the Tribal Sovereignty Clinic, where students work directly with tribes.

Adam Crepelle is assistant professor of law and director of Mason’s new Tribal Law and Economics Program. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services/��AV

What is Indian Law?

“Tribes are separate sovereigns in the U.S. Constitutional order,” said Crepelle, who serves as an associate justice on the Pascua Yaqui Tribe’s Court of Appeals. “You have the federal government, state governments, and Indian Tribes.”

Because the 574 federally recognized tribes are sovereign governments, the presumption is state law does not apply on reservations, Crepelle said.

It’s a clash over who governs Indian lands, he said.

For example, according to Indian law, to arrest someone you must determine whether the victim and perpetrator are Indians, assess the type of crime, and the status of the land.

“This causes lots of public safety issues because nobody knows who can arrest who,” Crepelle said. “Law and economics study institutions and their efficiency…[the work of TLEP] is important because federal Indian law is anything but efficient.”

Working with Tribes

“Students benefit by being a part of this clinic because they get to work with tribes and implement policies that make a change in the real world,” Crepelle said. “They’re actually helping build institutions, writing laws for a sovereign nation.”

Eight students are enrolled in the clinic this semester, Crepelle said, with many working on projects related to tribal court development.

One project aims to implement the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

“The general rule is if a non-Indian beats his Indian wife on a reservation, the tribe can’t do anything about it,” Crepelle said. “By implementing [VAWA], now the tribe can prosecute him for domestic violence.”

“For too long [Indian nations] have been locked out, in many ways, from the opportunities and outcomes afforded to the broader U.S. population,” said Michael B. Miley, a third-year student from Vermont. “Federal Indian Law is an important and enlightening class because it precisely elucidated the myriad ways we have arrived at our current status quo.”

“Armed with this knowledge, students…are able to better meet, analyze, and resolve specific legal challenges that Indian tribes and tribal governments confront today,” Miley said.

It’s a unique opportunity for everyone involved.

“When else is a law student going to get an opportunity to write a code of civil procedure that will actually go into effect and see real cases?” said James Gray, a second-year law student who’s drafting code for an Intertribal Commercial Court about on-reservation investments and commercial disputes.

It’s more than a class assignment; it’s a responsibility.

“Mistakes could negatively impact the tribes and businesses conducting cases in the court,” said Gray, who is working with a judge from the Tunica-Biloxi tribe.

Gray said helping tribes use their sovereignty to advance their economies has been rewarding. He has also enjoyed learning from guest speakers, from tribal council members to Indian Law practitioners to former Senate advisors on Indian affairs.

“The Tribal Law and Economics Program is a really exciting opportunity for the school to grow into a field that law schools have under-invested in,” Gray said. “I think there's lots of room to make rapid progress.”

Topics

Antonin Scalia Law School

Law/Legal

Scalia Law School

Tribal Law and Economics Program

Native American

American Indian

experiential learning

Tribal Sovereignty Clinic

Mason alum Kelli Jo Ford receives 2022 NEA fellowship

Colleen Rich — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:45:41 +0000

Mason alum Kelli Jo Ford receives 2022 NEA fellowship Colleen Rich Thu, 01/13/2022 - 15:45

Kelli Jo Ford. Photo by Val Ford Hancock

��AV alum and author Kelli Jo Ford, MFA Creative Writing '07, is the recipient of one of this year's National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships in Creative Writing.

Ford's debut novel, “Crooked Hallelujah,” was named one of the best books of 2020 by Publishers Weekly and was on the longlist for the 2021 Carnegie Medal for Fiction, among other accolades.

Ford, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, was also named to Oprah Magazine’s list of Native American Authors to Read Right Now in 2020.

The NEA fellowships provide published creative writers with $25,000 so they can set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.

Ford teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Low Residency MFA Creative Writing program in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and said she plans to use the funding to dial back her teaching responsibilities this spring and take on fewer speaking events in order to begin work on a new novel.

"This summer, I hope to travel with my family back to the Cherokee Nation, where the book takes place, to research and write," she said.

Ford lives in Virginia with her husband and fellow MFA alum, poet Scott Weaver, and their daughter, Cypress.