Keynote speakers announced for NSU’s 44th Annual Symposium

(Tahlequah, Okla.)-- The Northeastern State University 44th Annual Symposium on the American Indian is set for April 11-16 on the Tahlequah campus. This years theme is Indigenous Movement: Empowering Generations for Progressive Revitalization and features several keynote speakers: Dr. Suzan Shown Harjo, Dallas Goldtooth, Chase Iron Eyes, Tanaya Winder and Mary Hermes.

Harjo is the first keynote speaker set to present on Wednesday, April 13 at 10:30 a.m. discussing Native Peoples Activism for Human, Civil, and Treaty Rights.

President of The Morning Star Institute and an award-winning columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network, Harjo is guest curator and editor for the National Museum of the American Indians 2014-2018 exhibit and book, Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations.

Harjo is of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee tribes. She is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator and policy advocate, who has helped the native people protect sacred places and recover more than one million acres of land. She has developed key laws to promote and protect Native nations, sovereignty, children, arts, cultures, languages, religious freedom and repatriation. She has been presented with the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom and the 2015 Native Leadership Award.

Also on April 13, Dallas Goldtooth will present Indigenous Resistance, Activism, and How I find Angry Indians Hilarious. This presentation will begin at1 p.m.

Goldtooth is of the Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine tribe and he is the Keystone XL Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network and also a Dakota cultural/language teacher. He is a co-founder of the indigenous comedy group, The 1491s. He is also a poet, traditional artist, powwow emcee, Dennis Banks impersonator and comedian.

OnThursday, April 14, Chase Iron Eyes, J.D., will present Social Media and Activism at10 a.m.

Iron Eyes received his law degree from the University of Denver School of Law and currently serves as an attorney. He is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and has dedicated himself to ending the marginalization of his brothers and sisters by fighting in courts and, more recently, by co-founding LastRealIndians.com, which helped lead an effort on behalf of the Oceti Sakowin to regain control of Pe Sla, one of their most sacred sites in the Black Hills.

Tanaya Winder, MFA, will present The Resistance and Resilience of Heartwork later that afternoon at1 p.m.

Winder is a writer, an educator, a motivational speaker and a spoken word poet from the Southern Ute, Duckwater Shoshone and Pyramid Lake Paiute Nations. She grew up on the Southern Ute Indian reservation and attended college at Stanford University where she earned a bachelors degree in English.

After college, she pursued her passion of poetry and received her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. Since then she has co-founded As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, a literary magazine publishing works by indigenous women and women of color.

In addition to sharing her individual work through a keynote presentation, Winder will present her traveling exhibit, Sing Our Rivers Red, which raises awareness of violence against Indigenous women.

The last keynote speaker is Dr. Mary Hermes and she presents Friday, April 15 at 10 a.m.

Hermes is a scholar, teacher and language activist working with Ojibwe communities in Minnesota. Her work investigates the effectiveness of various teaching methods and technologies for indigenous language communities. She has worked with the Ojibwe Conversations Project to produce childrens books and is currently the lead researcher for the Ojibwe Conversational Archives project funded by the National Science Foundation.

She has published articles on language learning, language and technology, and language revitalization. Hermes is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota.

All presentations from keynote speakers will be located in the UC Ballroom and are free and open to the public. For more information regarding the Symposium and a full schedule visitwww.nsuok.edu/symposium.