Dusti Bridges
Dusti Bridges is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology minoring in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University. As an archaeologist, her interests lie primarily in 17th and 18th century Indigenous communities in Northeastern North America, particularly those of the Haudenosaunee. Her research focuses on migrations and community restructurings following European exploration, trade, and colonization. Through this work she investigates processes that strengthen community ties and encourage resilience in displaced and diasporic populations, and explores the long-term effects of movement due to violence among relocated communities and those with whom they have taken residence. Dusti is currently using her background in geographic information systems to support the contributors and research of this project.
María Castex
María Castex is originally from Buenos Aires but grew up in Miami, FL. She received her BA in art history from Barnard College, writing a senior thesis on modernism and identity politics in Mexico. Post-graduation, María will be joining McKinsey & Co. as an Associate out of the Denver, CO office.
Professor Eric Cheyfitz
Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he is on the faculty and former director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. His scholarship and teaching focus on the force of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples and their ongoing resistance in the form of alternative ways of thought and action to the predatory capitalism embedded in settler existence. With this focus in mind, he has lately been publishing work on the intersectionality of settler colonialism in Native America and Palestine. His latest book is The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States, the final chapter of which “Thinking from a Different Place: What is a Just Society?” proposes an Indigenous alternative to capitalism’s failure to provide a democracy of social justice.
Professor Paul Fleming
Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies as well as the Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities, Paul Fleming has published monographs on Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (2009) and The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (2006) along with edited volumes on Hans Blumenberg, Siegfried Kracauer, the scholars around Stefan George, and Ulrich Peltzer. His translation of Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic appeared in 2002 and of Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River in 2010. He is currently co-translating Blumenberg’s The Saint Matthew Passion for Cornell Press as well as completing a book-length project that examines the use of the anecdote in and as theory with respect to questions of exemplarity, evidence, history, and rhetoric. Fleming’s teaching and research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth century German and European literature, especially the novel; aesthetics and hermeneutics from 1750 to the present; Critical Theory; the relation between narration and knowledge. He is co-editor of the book series Paradigms: Literature & the Human Sciences in de Gruyter Press as well as of the series Manhattan Manuscripts in Wallstein Press.
Kimberly Fuqua (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina)
Kimberly Fuqua (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) ’21 is a Cornell University Master of Public Administration (MPA) student with a focus on Public Administration with Educational Policy.
Dr. Charles Geisler
An emeritus professor of Development Sociology at Cornell, Charles Geisler focused his research on land appropriation and terra nullius narratives, along with their human displacement and alienation consequences.
Laiken Jordhal
Laiken Jordahl is an activist and ally helping to bring awareness to the harm caused by wall construction at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Professor Kurt Jordan
Associate Professor and Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. Dr. Jordan’s research centers on the archaeology of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples, emphasizing the settlement patterns, housing, and political economy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Senecas. The empirical evidence provided by archaeology can do much to combat inaccurate narratives of Indian decline and powerlessness that pervade scholarly and popular writing about Native Americans. For example, fieldwork at the 1715-1754 Seneca Townley-Read site near Geneva, New York, recovered data indicating substantial Seneca autonomy, selectivity, innovation, and opportunism in an era usually considered to be one of cultural disintegration.
Native American and Indigenous Students at Cornell (NAISAC)
NAISAC Mission Statement: Native American and Indigenous Students at Cornell (NAISAC) exists to promote and preserve understanding of Indigenous cultures of the Americas, to raise awareness of Indigenous issues, and to foster networks among American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, First Nations, and other Indigenous students and alumni of Cornell University.
Dr. Meredith Palmer (Six Nations Tuscarora)
Meredith Alberta Palmer (Six Nations Tuscarora) is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell where she is hosted by Professor Suman Seth, and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program where she is co-hosted by Professor Jolene Rickard. She received her PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley in 2020, and MPH from UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health in 2015. Meredith received her BS from Cornell University, in Development Sociology.
Professor Jon Parmenter
Jon Parmenter is a historian of colonial North America, specializing in the history of indigenous peoples in the Northeast, particularly that of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). He took advantage of my status as a dual citizen of the Canada and the United States to train at what is now Western University in his hometown of London, Ontario, Canada, and completed his doctorate at University of Michigan. His first book, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701 (2010, reissued in paperback in Canada and the USA in 2014) was published with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He argues that the extensive spatial mobility engaged in by Haudenosaunee people after their first contact with Europeans represented a geographical expression of Haudenosaunee social, political, and economic priorities. He drew on archival and published documents in several languages, archaeological data, published Haudenosaunee oral traditions, and GIS technology to reconstruct the Haudenosaunee settlement landscape and the paths of human mobility that built and sustained it. Many of his article-length publications in journals such as Journal of Early American History, Diplomatic History, William and Mary Quarterly, and Recherches Amerindiennes au Quebec are available for consultation at his Academia.edu webpage. His current research interests include the historical experience of allied Indian nations in the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution, the impact of the U.S./Canada border on Native American nations, and contemporary Haudenosaunee nation-building initiatives.
At Cornell University, Jon Parmenter is an associate professor, and has served as a legal and historical consultant to several Haudenosaunee communities, including most recently the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and the Oneida Indian Nation. In December 2014, Professor Parmenter was honored to be qualified as a recognized Historical Expert in the History and Ethnography of the Iroquois, in Ontario Superior Court.
Dr. David Strip ’77, PhD ’78
A graduate of Cornell University’s operations research department, Dr. Strip spent three decades working at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, where he worked in R&D management, modeling and mathematics, and massively parallel computing. He has a dozen patents across a variety of domains. Since retiring from the labs, Dr. Strip volunteered as a site steward for the Santa Fe National Forest, served as a board member for the Hopi Education Endowment Fund, and is an on-call scientist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Human Rights Program. Dr. Strip has also established a supplementary fund to support students in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell.
Dr. Shaawano Chad Uran (White Earth Anishinaabe)
Dr. Uran is a Lecturer in Cornell’s English Department. His research and writing concern Anishinaabe language revitalization, Indigenous representation and the media, the socio-politics of music, and analysis of Zombie narratives in Indigenous and popular culture.
Dr. Fred Wien
Fred Wien has an Honours B.A. in Political Studies and Spanish from Queen’s University (1962-66), and an M.S. and PhD. in Development Sociology, Government and Latin American Studies from Cornell University (1966-71). He has been appointed at Dalhousie University since 1973 and served as Director of the Maritime School of Social Work at Dalhousie University from 1981-86.
Between 1992-96, Dr. Wien served as the Deputy Director of Research at the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. His research has included work on the funding formula for First Nation child welfare agencies, strategies for addressing poverty as a determinant of First Nation health, and social assistance policy on reserve in the Maritimes.
He holds a professor emeritus appointment at Dalhousie University, and was made a Member of the Order of Canada in December, 2015.