Tuesday, February 7
3-4:30pm
Kaufman 200

Visiting Scholar Lecture
Tria Blu Wakpa
Ph.D. Candidate in The Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley
Fixing and Eclipsing: Native American Dance in Educational and Carceral Contexts

This talk addresses how non-Native o­fficials and Native peoples in both colonial and contemporary institutions have used dance for disparate and often conflicting purposes. It examines how from the late 1800s to the early 1970s, Native American boarding schools, institutions designed to assimilate Indigenous youth, sought to curtail students' “Indianness” - except for in dance and other forms of art, embodiment, and play. The talk then interrogates how, today, tribal and state detention centers represent Native social dances and ceremonies as a component of Native peoples' rehabilitation. What, it asks, is the role of dance in these historical policings of "Indianness" and the contemporary promotions of cultural wellbeing? And how does dance both “fix” and “eclipse” these regulatory attempts at disciplining and rehabilitating Native peoples and bodies? To examine the connections and disjunctures between these approaches and the role of dance in educational and carceral contexts, this presentation conducts close readings of a fancy shawl dance performance, boarding school newspaper articles, visual images, and interviews. In doing so, it offers two new theoretical framework – fixing and eclipsing – to explain how institutional officials and Native peoples have sought to create, contest, and protect cultural significances about and through dance.

Friday, February 10, 2017
11 AM – 6 PM
Charles E. Young Research Library

Saturday, February 11, 2017
11 AM – 6 PM
Location TBA

This symposium will address the destructive impact of the US criminal justice system — including through policing, courts, jails, prisons, and immigration detention facilities — on the physical and mental health of racially and economically vulnerable communities, people with disabilities, and families. A central theme and purpose of the event involves confronting contemporary criminal justice practices as, essentially, a public health crisis. Some specific areas for dialogue and learning include the degenerative health effects of prison and detention conditions, collective trauma and terror within communities of color stemming from police violence, justice system treatment of sexually vulnerable and gender-nonconforming people, deaths of incarcerated people with mental illness, the invisibility of indigenous people in contemporary dialogue about policing and incarceration, racial profiling, detention and persecution of Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern people, and the relationship between healthcare and social service disparities and vulnerability to arrest and incarceration.

Hosted by Repair; co-sponsored by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center