Indigenous Activist-Educator Voices and Local Ecologies

Join this special co-sponsored public event on Indigenous Activist-Educator Voices and Local Ecologies. 

 

Elder Vernon Masayesva and Professor Sheilah Nicholas will share their experience as ecological/educational activists and language/literacy educators in support of their ancestral Hopi lands and peoples as an inextricable part of our spiritual and ecological world.

 

WHEN: November 15, 2024

WHERE: South Ballroom, Student Union

TIME: 6 p.m.

 

Read more about the speakers:

 

Vernon Masayesva is the Executive Director of Black Mesa Trust, a Hopi Leader of the Coyote Clan and a former Chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council from the village of Hotevilla, one of the oldest continuously inhabited human settlement in the Americas in Arizona. Masayesva received his B.A. degree from Arizona State University in Political Science and a Masters of Arts from Central Michigan University in 1970. He returned to Black Mesa of the Hotevilla Bacavi Community School, the first Indian controlled school on Hopi as the lead educator of the school systems. In 1984, he was elected to the Hopi Tribal Council and then served as Chairman from 1989. He immersed himself in the tangled intricacies of the mining on Black Mesa and the Hopi – Navajo land dispute, and is widely respected on and off the reservation.

 

In 1998, he founded the Black Mesa Trust and currently serves as its Executive Director. Vernon is an international speaker on the subject of Water and is honored among many scientists, physicists and water researchers including renown author and water researcher Dr. Masaru Emoto from Japan.  Among other things, he is beginning a serious study of Hopi symbols and metaphors to understand who he is and what he can do to help his people lay a vision of a future Hopi society. As a result of his commitment to preserving our water, former President William Clinton honored him as an “Environmental Hero.” Charles Wilkinson, a distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Colorado said, “You will gain a strong sense of history, of millennia, from listening to Vernon, but my guess is you will also see something else--the future--for Vernon embodies personal qualities and philosophical attitudes that can serve our whole society well in the challenging years that lie ahead.”

 

Sheilah E. Nicholas is a member of the Hopi Tribe located in Arizona.  She is a Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies (TLSS) at the University of Arizona (UA). She teaches courses in Indigenous Culture-Based Education, Language and Culture, Oral Traditions, Language Minority Education, and Teacher Research.  She is also a Faculty Instructor for the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) and Immersion Instructor-Consultant for the Indigenous Language Institute, Sante Fe, NM. Her scholarship and research focus includes: Indigenous/Hopi language maintenance and reclamation, Indigenous language ideologies and epistemologies, the intersection of language, culture and identity, and Indigenous language teacher education.  Her publications draw on her dissertation, “Becoming ‘Fully’ Hopi:  The Role of the Hopi Language in the Contemporary Lives of Hopi Youth—A Hopi Case Study of Language Shift and Vitality” and her work with the Hopi Tribe’s Hopilavayi Summer Institute for Hopi language teachers (2004-2010).  Along with colleagues Dr. Teresa McCarty and Dr. Michael Seltzer at UCLA and Dr. Tiffany Lee at UNM, she is the UA Co-PI of a national study, “Indigenous-Language Immersion and Native American Student Achievement” funded by the Spencer Foundation. Her own upcoming research will engage a Hopi community school in a self-study regarding the role of schools in language reclamation efforts.