Ithaca College Faculty Member to Discuss Indigenous Resurgence

By Dave Maley, September 20, 2018
Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar makes first presentation in CSCRE Discussion Series.

“The Future, Still: Constellations of Indigenous Resurgence” will be the topic of the first talk this fall in the Ithaca College Center for the Study or Culture, Race, and Ethnicity (CSCRE) Discussion Series. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, an assistant professor in CSCRE, will speak at 6 p.m. in Clark Lounge, Campus Center. His presentation is free and open to the public.

Casumbal-Salazar earned his Ph.D. in Indigenous Politics from the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and has served as a Ford Fellow and Mellon-Hawaiʻi Fellow. His forthcoming book — “First Light: Indigenous Struggle and Astronomy on Mauna a Wākea” — examines the controversy over the Thirty Meter Telescope and the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea.

“When Indigenous peoples fight against giant telescopes or oil pipelines on sacred lands, we are not ‘obstructing progress’ or ‘inventing traditions,’” said Casumbal-Salazar. “Such stereotypes affirm white capitalist heteropatriarchy in America by casting defiant Indigenous peoples as backwards-looking, trapped in a romanticized past, irrational, or criminal. When Native peoples refuse settler colonial erasures, it is not because we are ‘dwelling in the past’ or conjuring ‘authenticity’… We are building futures rooted in a continuum of Indigenous becomings.”

The theme of this year’s discussion series is On Native Lands: Decolonization, Solidarity & Resurgence. The CSCRE delivers a curriculum focused primarily on African-, Latino/a-, Asian-, and Native-American (ALANA) people in the United States, who are usually marginalized, under-represented and/or misrepresented in the normative curriculum. CSCRE also fosters critical dialogues on race through its discussion series, which brings several speakers, artists and performers to Ithaca each year.

For more information, visit www.ithaca.edu/cscre.