Panelists last night during an event titled "Shared Experiences: Indigenous Voices" brought to light the past and present injustices inflicted upon Native Americans and Australian Aborigines and drew connections between the experiences of the two groups.
The American Studies Program and the Arts, Sciences & Engineering Diversity Fund co−sponsored the event, which was held in the Sophia Gordon Hall Multipurpose Room. The Tufts University Art Gallery spearheaded the event.
The event kicked off at 5:30 p.m. with a buffet catered by a Native American−run company in the Aidekman Arts Center.
Attendees next were offered a guided tour of the Tufts University Art Gallery exhibition displaying the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Richard Bell, whose work is a form of activism shedding light on past and present social injustices.
Joan Lester, lecturer of American Studies, who specializes in Native American issues and moderator of the panel discussion, cited Bell's work as an inspiration for the event.
"When I read the catalog of Richard Bell's work … I realized that there were incredible and disturbing connections between what had happened and what is still happening in Australia and what was happening and is still happening here in the United States to native people," Lester said.
Lester was also motivated to organize a film series on Native American and Australian Aboriginal topics, the third film of which will be showed on Nov. 3.
The panel featured three Native American panelists, each of whom delivered a 15−minute presentation, and one Australian Aboriginal activist who responded to each of the presentations.
"The panelists are impressive, all four of them are amazing," Lester said. "All of these panelists are warriors."
Linda Coombs, an AquinnahWampanoag Martha's Vineyard resident and the program director of the Aquinnah Cultural Center, delivered the first presentation. She discussed the destructive impact of colonization and the silencing of Native American history.
"The deeper, darker meanings of colonization have been bred out of American history," Coombs said. "However, people still carry associated attitudes and behaviors that go unrecognized for what they actually are."
Ron Plain, an Anishinaabe activist from Ontario who has fought against local environmental contamination, followed, highlighting instances of environmental racism inflicted against the native peoples of North America. He cited as an example the health crisis in his homeland caused by exposure to 62 petrochemical plants.
Jennifer Weston, a Hunkpapa Lakota woman and manager of Cultural Survival's endangered language program in Cambridge, discussed the attempts to eradicate Native American languages.
She screened a short film called "We Are Still Here" (2010) about the struggle of Euchee people of Oklahoma to preserve their language. The tribe, which is not recognized by the federal government, has a language linguistically distinct from any other, she said.
Despite the UNESCO estimates that she cited that an indigenous language "goes silent" every two weeks, Weston has not lost hope in her fight to save tribal tongues.
"It doesn't really matter what kind of attack our people come under; our languages are our people's souls," she affirms. "They hold our connections not only to the past and the future but also to our very origins. Every language is a very unique account of human creation."
The final panelist, Mick Dodson, is a visiting professor at Havard University's Kennedy School of Government and in 2009 was named Australian of the Year for his work on behalf of the nation's Aboriginal people.
Dodson related the experiences of the other speakers to his own.
"Listening to my brother and my two sisters talk about their experiences, I can assure you this is the same s−−t we're dealing with at home," he said. "The commonality of the issues in front of us is stark, and that's because they're not very different, because we also were sick of being discovered."
Dodson explained that white people today do indeed share responsibility for the injustices perpetrated by whites of the past.
"We accept you weren't the thief, but god you've been benefiting from that theft for a long time," he said.
Lester, from her perspective as a white woman, echoed Dodson's remark in her closing statements.
"We [white people] enjoy white privilege often without even knowing that we're enjoying it, and I think one of our responsibilities is to recognize that, and serve as allies as much as we possibly can, not to take over, not to lead, but to be there as support, as listener, and as ally whenever it's possible," she said.
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Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the documentary as being titled "We Still Live Here." Furthermore, the it neglected to mention that the Tufts University Art Gallery was the organization spearheading the event.
