A one-day hybrid event, consisting of two panels on American Indian law, writing, sovereignty and self-determination.

The first colloquium panel will include three speakers from the Wampanoag communities at Mashpee and Aquinnah. Wampanoag panelist will speak to law, writing, sovereignty and self-determination in the context of Wampanoag, language, storytelling, culture and history.

The second panel will be dedicated to discussions and interpretations of literary works, archival documents and legal philosophical texts in the context of Federal Indian Law. Presenters for this panel will include faculty from Northeastern University and faculty from Boston area universities.

The colloquium will be organized and run conjointly by the Northeastern University English Department, The Humanities Center, and the CSSH Dean’s Office.

Morning Session

9:00 to 9:30 am: Meet and greet (coffee, tea and light snacks)

9:45 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks

10:00 – 11:45 am: Panel Beshig: Wampanoag History, Culture, Language and Storytelling

Afternoon Session

12:00 – 1:00 pm: Lunch break with short presentations by Native American Literature, English 2490 Students

1:30 – 3:15 pm: Panel Niizh: American Indian Law, Literature and the Indigenous Archive

3:30 to 4:00 pm: Open discussion

4:15 – 4:30 pm: Closing Remarks

Speaker Bios:

Alan Niles is a Lecturer on English at Harvard University. He is a scholar of transatlantic and early American literature and culture, with a focus on New England colonialism. His research and teaching have explored Harvard’s historic ties to Indigenous communities and the establishment of a new colonial regime of property. His book project explores how moments of media-historical change prompt a return to and reinscription of memory, focusing on transformations in archives and access to sources of the early American past.

Amira Madison was raised on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. She is an enrolled citizen of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah and currently sits as Councilwoman on Tribal Council. She serves as the Clerk for the recently formed Aquinnah Land Initiative, Inc. and is a member of the Wampanoag Consulting Alliance (WCA). Over the years she’s worked hard to serve Indigenous communities in many different capacities. She was the Tribal Youth Coordinator for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah, a Docent at the Aquinnah Cultural Center, and served two consecutive terms as the Female Co-President of United National Indian Tribal Youth, Inc. (UNITY). Before starting this role, she served as the first Supporting Indigenous Communities Program Manager for the City of Boston in the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the Equity and Inclusion Cabinet. Amira graduated from Northeastern University with a B.A. in History and a minor in International Affairs.

Camille Madison is a proud citizen of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head(Aquinnah), she was born and raised in the City of Boston, where she attended and graduated from Boston Public Schools. Camille quite naturally came into Youth Work and has over two decades of diversified experience in various positions and programs, in and around the city. Her earlier experience ranges from that of education, to crisis intervention, and administration, which has informed and shaped her overall work in service to her communities. Camille often volunteered to organize and support events for non-profit programs, and later served on the Board of Directors for The North American Indian Center of Boston. Her passion has always been in support of youth, and later, Wôpanâôt8âôk(the Wampanoag Language). Camille became a certified teacher and speaker for the Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project in 2016. She then went on to become a certified Montessori Directress and Lead Teacher for the Weetumuw School, at Mukayuhsak Weekuw(The Children's House). She is currently serving a second term on Tribal Council for her Tribal Nation. She is newly elected to the local School Board Committee for the Town of Mashpee, Camille continues to volunteer in meaningful ways and teach language in Aquinnah, and across Wampanoag communities, which she believes is life-long work.

Linda Coombs is a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe on Martha's Vineyard, and have lived in Mashpee for more than 40 years. Her two grandchildren are enrolled with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, as was their father and grandfather. She has worked for 45 years as a museum educator, and spent 11 years total at the Boston Children's Museum, 30 years in the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation, and 9 years at the Aquinnah Cultural Center, a house museum built by an Aquinnah Wampanoag man, and showing that history. She has been an interpreter, an artisan, a researcher; led workshops and teacher institutes; written children's stories and articles on various aspects of Wampanoag history and culture; and developed and worked on all aspects of a wide variety of exhibits. The goal of all of her work continues to be the communication of accurate and appropriate representations about the history, cultures, and people of the Wampanoag and other Indigenous nations.

David Weeden is a very active enrolled member/citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, and has worked with the Tribe since 2015 first as the Deputy THPO before ascending to the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) position in 2019; a job which he is extremely passionate about. Past professional accomplishments are working as an independent contractor, draftsman/detailer, cultural educator, union laborer foreman, and museum interpreter before taking his recent positions.

Getty L. Lustila is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Associate Director of the Humanities Center. Getty earned his PhD in Philosophy from Boston University in 2019. He is trained as a specialist in early modern European philosophy, with a focus in the history of ethics and political thought. Getty’s writing has centered on a number of figures, including David Hume, John Gay, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Damaris Masham, Adam Smith, and Sophie de Grouchy. He is the book reviews editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. Getty also teaches and writes on Indigenous philosophy, and is currently working on a co-authored manuscript titled, An Introduction to Indigenous Philosophy. He is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, Atlantic theatre and performance, and transatlantic print culture. She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014), which won the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research, and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004), which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. She is co-editor with Michael Drexler of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, Textualities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). She has published widely in journals on topics from aesthetics, to the novel and performance in the early Atlantic world, to Barbary pirates and zombies. She is the Co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the former the chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. She currently serves on the editorial boards of CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics and the Women Writers Project and has served on the editorial boards of Early American Literature and American Literature and the advisory board of PMLA. She is the founder of the award-winning crowd-sourced digital archive Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, and the co-founder and co-director of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive.