UMass Amherst faculty members and doctoral students will present at the 2023 Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Symposium, organized by Five Colleges, Inc. and the Five Colleges NAIS faculty, at Amherst College Oct. 12-13.

Image

The symposium, themed “Gatherings at the Crossroads: Abya Yala & Activism,” will bring together activists, authors and historians, and feature all-day programming including panels, readings and conversations with Indigenous writers and scholars in American and Native American studies from UMass, Emory University, University of California Davis, Yale University and Carleton University.

On Thursday evening, Carlos Flores Quispe, a Quechua doctoral student in the Spanish and Portuguese studies program at UMass Amherst, will be among five indigenous writers who will give readings. A cookout will be held prior to the reading at the Book and Plow Farm.

On Friday, Kathleen Brown-Perez, Brothertown Indian Nation, who is a senior lecturer in the Commonwealth Honors College and chair of the Five College NAIS Certificate Program, will deliver the welcome and opening remarks. Later, Quispe will be part of a panel facilitated by Daniela Narvaez Burbano, a doctoral student in Hispanic linguistics at UMass Amherst and lecturer in Spanish at Amherst College. The event will close that evening with a tour of the Boundless exhibit and a reception at the Mead Art Museum.

Image

Abya Yala, as referenced in the symposium theme, refers to the continent of the Americas in the language of Kuna/Guna peoples. It can be translated as “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood.” The concept emerged toward the end of the 1970s in the Kuna territory of Dulenega, Panama, when Kuna activists won a lawsuit to stop the construction of a shopping mall. They employed the term Abya Yala to refer to the American continent in its totality.

Since the 1980s, Indigenous movements have increasingly referred to the Americas as Abya Yala, enacting an Indigenous locus of cultural and political expression to decolonize epistemologies. Emil’ Keme has recently proposed “Abiayala as a transhemispheric Indigenous bridge” which can foster dialogues that “could potentially lead us to develop” and renew “political alliances.”

In this symposium, activists, writers and scholars will gather from Indigenous homelands in the Northeast with those from across Abya Yala to foster dialogue and, potentially, create alliances. Abya Yala represents the many crossroads that connect the Indigenous peoples of the continent, including the Connecticut River Valley.

The symposium is free and open to the public, though guests are encouraged to register for all events. For more information, schedule and registration, visit the Five College NAIS Symposium website.