THURSDAY, MAY, 17 Legislative Educational Activism in the NCAI, 1970s-1980s Brooke Linsenbardt, Texas A&M University 001. Women Leading Community Protection and Empowerment, This paper will explore indigenous women’s leadership and Since the 20th Century legislative educational activism in the National Congress of Panel American Indian during the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, these 8:00 to 9:45 am women helped create NCAI policies and views on education InterContinental: Beverlywood Room 520 issues, such as the support for bilingual education and This panel examines several ways indigenous women have and continue to indigenous-controlled schools. For example, the Education sustain their communities for survival during the mid-twentieth to early Committee wrote a policy paper against the transfer or twenty-first centuries. In particular, women’s leadership in the National dismantling of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) because it Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the urban center of Dallas would reduce or eliminate the special trust relationships and exhibit their role as protectors of political and cultural sovereignties in the services between indigenous nations and the United States context of settler colonial termination, relocation, and environmental federal government. This paper also examines women’s policies. With the use of NCAI records and personal writings, two papers participation as a means to protect their respective nations and analyze the NCAI’s policies regarding treaty rights, the trust relationship communities by being representatives to the NCAI, a political, between indigenous nations and the United States federal government, transnational organization based in what is now Washington D.C. citizenship and bicultural/bilingual education. Specifically, NCAI The NCAI differs from other indigenous organizations, like the representatives Helen Peterson (Oglala Lakota) and Ruth Muskrat Bronson American Indian Movement, in the mid-to-late twentieth century (Cherokee) discussed citizenship and the relationship between Native because of its close relationship to the BIA. Other indigenous peoples and the United States government in the context of termination. As organizations and activists considered the BIA an arm of the the threat of termination subsided, the NCAI supported Native control of settler colonial state, while NCAI representatives understood this education as an expression of sovereignty and self-determination, relationship to be necessary in order to change legislation and demonstrated in the passage of the Indian Education Act (1972). Oral policy. In addition to influencing legislation and policy, the histories are another important source to discuss women’s leadership. NCAI disseminated information about how to obtain funds. This Peggy Larney (Choctaw) and Yolanda BlueHorse (Rosebud Lakota) are was another important aspect of legislative educational activism two examples of indigenous women’s responses to settler colonial threats because leaders needed to understand the funding process from a in Dallas. These women participated in decolonial and indigenization settler colonial, or U.S. federal government perspective, in order efforts and supported the #NoDAPL movement by founding the American to be awarded funds for their respective organizations, Indian Heritage Day and organizing “Stand with Standing Rock” communities, and nations. Thus, the varying aspects of women’s demonstrations. This panel showcases how indigenous women leaders in involvement with the NCAI and the Education Committee different locales and capacities protected and empowered their respective equates to educational activism. communities. Native Women Indigenizing Dallas Since the Late Twentieth Chair: Century Farina King, Northeastern State University; Brooke Linsenbardt, Texas A&M University Yolonda Blue Horse, Society of Native Nations, Texas Participants: Oral histories are some of the most significant sources that amplify voices of Native communities and women leaders that Ruth Muskrat Bronson and Helen Peterson’s Definitions of have developed and sought to Indigenize urban spaces like Trusteeship, Citizenship, and Guilt in the Mid-Twentieth Dallas. Since the mid-twentieth century, diverse Native Century Mary Klann, University of California, San Diego Americans began to gather and connect Indigenous communities This paper analyzes writings of two influential Native women in Dallas, which was designated as a Relocation site. Peggy activists and executive directors of the National Congress of Larney (Choctaw), co-founder of American Indian Heritage Day American Indians (NCAI)—Ruth Muskrat Bronson (Cherokee) in Texas, first came to Dallas through the Relocation Program and Helen Peterson (Oglala Lakota). From the mid-1940s and has ever since dedicated her efforts to decolonizing Dallas. through the mid-1950s, through their work with the NCAI, Yolanda BlueHorse (Rosebud Sioux/Lakota) of the Society of Bronson and Peterson worked to define the federal trust Native Nations began to lead various demonstrations in the relationship between tribes and the United States and Native Dallas area to “Stand with Standing Rock,” including one of the peoples’ status as American citizens in the context of expanding first rallies in front of the Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) termination policies. Bronson and Peterson directly confronted headquarters. BlueHorse has been a driving force behind terminationists who claimed that Native people were not “full” coalition building in Dallas against the Dakota Access Pipeline American citizens, and abolishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other related ETP projects such as the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. and “emancipating” Native people from the federal government Native women have been advocating and representing would elevate their status in the American polity. Addressing Indigenous communities in Dallas for decades. They now join non-Natives’ historical ambivalence about Native people in the their voices with diverse Native Americans from throughout the United States, they spoke candidly about the damaging state but especially in the oil metropole of Dallas—a space that consequences of—in Bronson’s words—Americans’ “heritage of has been claimed as the home of ETP CEO Kelcy Warren after guilt…for the long and shameful history of broken treaties with Indigenous erasure and silencing— to support the #NoDAPL those [they] dispossessed.” Through their work with the NCAI, movement and “Mni Wiconi.” This presentation features the Bronson and Peterson explained the specific relationship Native Indigenous resurgence and renewal of intertribal community in people had with the United States government. They challenged Dallas since the late twentieth century to #NoDAPL by both terminationist legislators and those members of the non- contextualizing the historical presence and experiences of Native Native populace who had “sympathy for the underdog,” and American women in the city, including Larney and BlueHorse, “sentiment for the American Indian” to view the trust through their oral histories. relationship as legal protections for tribal resources, rather than Comment: an impediment to citizenship to be “terminated.” In Peterson’s Jenny Pulsipher, Brigham Young University words: “The question is whether our country is bold enough to permit the survival of governments which do not necessarily 002. Previous panel moved to Saturday conform to the white man’s concept of what is an ultimate good.” 003. Critical Alaskas: (Re)Reading and Translating Landscape, “Education is a Trust Responsibility”: Indigenous Women’s Language, and Identity Panel Further, this presentation will highlight the way the “vanishing 8:00 to 9:45 am Indian” trope appears in unexpected places—such as cultural InterContinental: Broadway Room 615 revitalization movements—in a way that effectively perpetuates the adjudication of Native identity. Alaska Native histories and contemporary politics, languages and revitalization efforts, and intellectual and conceptual frameworks are Decolonial Translations: Encountering Critical Theory Through thriving, complex, and historically rooted. Yet, Alaska Native politics are Indigenous Inspirations Sol Neely, University of Alaska, often found at the fringes of Native American and Indigenous studies, and Southeast Alaska's colonial history does not quite match the main analytics of the From the concrete exigencies of Lingít Aaní, this paper takes up field. In this panel, our four papers work to create, build, and enrich a series of critical meditations on the possibilities and difficulties existing theoretical tools in order to generate capacious methods to better of decolonial translation. Beginning with a critique of translation analyze varying Alaska Native experiences and histories. Our panel utilizes as an historically colonial enterprise, the paper then articulates a a range of methodological approaches while centering distinct Alaska notion of decolonial translation derived from Gerald Vizenorʼs Native engagements with myriad colonial technologies. We trace and “trickster hermeneutics” by which he describes trickster as the highlight how Alaska Native peoples both past and present refuse, resist, translator of creation and experience. The question that guides and retool conditions of coloniality, which contributes importantly to this first set of meditations is simple: Can the university, as an conversations within NAIS. From ethnographic inquiries into the historically white supremacist