Upcoming Events

Collective Mental Models for Good Human-Earth Relations: The Case of Tribal Nation and Indigenous Scientists in STEM Graduate Education  

Wednesday, February 26, 2025  from  10-11am Pacific on  Zoom

In 2025, the Faculty of Education Professor of Climate Complexity and Coloniality at the University of British Columbia will host a virtual seminar series, Repurposing Universities for the Climate & Nature Emergency. We are very excited to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman and Stephen J. Smith as the inaugural series speakers. Their talk is entitled: “Collective Mental Models for Good Human-Earth Relations: The Case of Tribal Nation and Indigenous Scientists in STEM Graduate Education.” The seminar will take place on Wednesday, February 26 from 10-11am Pacific.

Register here to receive the Zoom link to the session.

Abstract: Indigenous students remain vastly underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate programs. Simultaneously, Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities throughout the Americas and elsewhere work to protect their rights and relationships with land and their more-than-human kin. From pragmatic constructions of natural resources to rethinking good human and earth relations, community members who hold Indigenous Knowledges are place-rooted learners and teachers of their Tribal environments as well as vital would-be scientists who debate and balance multiple epistemologies and methodologies towards protection and care of their places. In this presentation, an Ojibwe biologist and a land-based educational researcher discuss our work to prepare university partners to develop new mental models of good human and earth relations. In doing so, we position Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples as central rights-holders and actors in this work and its immediate and long-range impacts.

Speaker Bios:

Stephen J. Smith (Steve) earned his dual undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry from Concordia University, M.S. in Biology from Bemidji State University, and a second M.S. in Chemistry from the College of St. Scholastica. His Ph.D. dissertation research in Conservation Sciences in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources (CFANS) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, focuses on climate change and adaptation, invasive species, and aquatic plants, specifically the impacts of the invasive species starry stonewort on natural stands of wild rice. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was a STEM faculty member at Leech Lake Tribal College for nearly a decade, and he also served as the Director of the environmental lab for MCT (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) comprised of six Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota. He is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and was raised and lived on Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe his entire life before attending his Ph.D. program.

Elizabeth Sumida Huaman is Wanka/Quechua from Peru with strong genealogical family and direct community ties across the Tawantinsuyo (four quarters of Inka lands), and specifically the regions of Junín, Huancavelica, and Cusco. She is Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and studies the relationship between Indigenous lands, cultural practices, and in and out-of-school learning with Indigenous communities and Tribal institutions in the Americas. Centering Indigenous knowledge systems, her work is situated in three areas—the interfaces between modernity, development, and Indigenous places; Indigenous community-based educational design and generative environmental pedagogies; and Indigenous and comparative frameworks and enactments of decolonial rights. As an Andean Indigenous scholar, her goal is to advance Quechua research methodologies, and she writes about these processes in fellowship with other Indigenous methodologists worldwide.

About the “Repurposing Universities for the Climate & Nature Emergency” virtual speaker series: Prevailing responses to the climate and nature emergency (CNE) in higher education often replicate “business as usual, but greener,” grounded in the same colonial frameworks that have led to an ecological crisis in the first place. This virtual speaker series asks how universities might instead be repurposed toward deeper social relevance and intergenerational and interspecies responsibility by addressing the CNE through practices that foster redistribution, reparation, and regeneration. Such a shift would require universities to confront their complicity in social and ecological harm and mobilize material, relational, and epistemic repair, particularly with those communities most impacted by the CNE and least responsible for causing it. The series will feature speakers at the forefront of efforts to repurpose the university through reparative approaches to research, teaching, and community collaborations.

Past Events

Healing the Dis-ease of Separation

October 20, 2023

Chief Ninawa Huni Kui launched the international digital campus of the University of the Forest at this virtual event. The University of the Forest (physical campus) is a gathering place in the Amazon where the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre come together for the intergenerational transmission of the wisdom that binds them inseparably to the Amazon biome. It is this profound connection that gives the Huni Kui the courage to place their lives at risk in safeguarding the rainforest and its delicate ecosystem.

The University of the Forest (international digital campus – universityoftheforest.org) is a collaborative initiative between the Huni Kui, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and the T5C network. It began as an experiment seeking to highlight how our modern imagination colonizes the ways we imagine the decolonization of universities.

The digital campus is an educational and artistic intervention aimed to inspire institutions to take a much bolder approach in climate education, recognizing the importance of the relational sciences and technologies developed by Indigenous Peoples across millenia.

Challenging False Solutions and Centering Indigenous Responses to the Climate Crisis

October 20, 2023

Indigenous Peoples have long identified colonialism, capitalism, and the commodification of nature as the central drivers of climate change. However, mainstream technocratic climate solutions fail to address these systemic root causes, often resulting in projects that violate Indigenous sovereignty and exacerbate ecological injustices. Against these false solutions, Indigenous communities around the world are leading their own climate responses and ‘just transitions’, grounded in their connections to territory, ancestral knowledges, and responsibilities to current and future generations. This panel, convened by Indigenous youth leader Mateus Tremembé, brings together Indigenous scholars who are challenging climate colonialism and catalyzing Indigenous-led responses to the climate crisis.

Speakers: Mateus Tremembé, Tabitha Robin, Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, Charlotte Coté. This event was co-sponsored by the Department of Educational Studies, the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, and the Centre for Climate Justice. It is part of a three-part seminar series organized by Mateus Tremembé focused on Indigenous Just Transitions, with other events happening at Trent University and the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusofonia (UNILAB) in Brazil.

Neocolonialism in the Green Transition: The Tremembé Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle Against Offshore Wind Farms

June 30, 2023

As the world seeks sustainable solutions to climate change, the green transition has gained significant momentum. However, it is crucial to critically examine the potential neocolonial implications of these efforts, particularly regarding Indigenous communities. In this presentation, Mateus Tremembé shed light on the ongoing struggle of the Tremembé Indigenous People in northeastern Brazil against the establishment of offshore wind farms in their ancestral territories. He positioned the wind farms as a continuation of colonial practices that threaten Tremembé autonomy, self-determination, and cultural integrity, and called on policymakers, researchers, and activists to ensure that environmental justice and the rights and aspirations of Indigenous Peoples are at the forefront of green transitions.

Moving with Storms (not your typical) Report E-Launch

June 30, 2023

Throughout the past academic year, the CNE Catalyst Program, an initiative of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, has fostered inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations to address the urgent and complex challenges posed by the climate and biodiversity crises, as well as movements for climate justice. By bringing together scholars, students, artists, disciplines, sectors, and communities, the program has sought to activate new ways of knowing and acting together in these challenging socio-ecological times. The program’s report, “Moving With Storms,” serves as a testament to the power of reimagining and repurposing academic spaces to confront the multifaceted challenges of our era. With a particular emphasis on institutional cultural change, engagement with Indigenous analyses, and the principles of redistribution, reparations, and restitution, this report is a tangible tool that can be utilized by other institutions seeking to create meaningful change. It showcases what is possible within academic settings, pushing the boundaries of what we once believed to be unimaginable in academic environments.

Neocolonialism in the Green Transition: Carbon Trading in the Amazon and Lithium Wars in Peru

June 27, 2023

In this presentation, Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, the hereditary Chief and president of the Huni Kui Indigenous People Association of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous rights advocate, Shyrlene Monerat Huni Kui, and Maria Jara Querar, a Quechua matriarch from the Valle Sagrado of Peru, delved into the manipulation of carbon markets in Brazil and the uprisings in Peru caused by the privatization of lithium mining, illustrating how governments in the global south employ these tactics to further dispossess and assimilate Indigenous Peoples. By examining the cases of Brazil and Peru, the panelists uncovered ways in which these governments weaponize policies against Indigenous rights to meet the demands for a green transition generated by the global north. The discussion explored how the green transition becomes a smokescreen for neocolonialism, perpetuating the marginalization and dispossession of Indigenous communities.

Beyond “Business as Usual” in University Climate Action

May 23, 2023

Universities are often understood to have a unique role in catalyzing climate action in society. But there is more than one way they can do this. On the one hand, universities must create space for conversations that welcome many different visions about their role in enabling possible futures in the face of the climate and nature emergency. On the other hand, the visions for the future that tend to take up the most space in these conversations are the ones that would sustain the status quo – visions that have been characterized as “business as usual, but greener.” If universities continue to sideline more critical and decolonial perspectives on the climate and nature emergency, climate action risks reproducing simplistic solutions, enacting unequal and paternalistic relationships with systemically marginalized communities, and educating people into the same Eurocentric imaginary of human progress and development that created today’s ecological crises in the first place. This talk asks we might reorient university climate action toward climate justice, emphasizing the challenges of this work, and offering a few examples of efforts in higher education to coordinate justice-oriented responses to today’s complex socio-ecological challenges.

From Universities to the UN: Navigating Colonial Institutions at the End of the World as We Know It

April 11, 2023

In the face of intensifying social and ecological crises, this conference asks how we might navigate colonial institutions – from universities to the UN – in ways that question their presumed benevolence and continuity while also mobilizing their resources to reduce harm and support the creation and revitalization of other possibilities for collective existence. Can we find space in the cracks of these institutions to, in the words of conference co-organizer Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, find new ways of living together in the midst of dying?

Panelists: Dr. Bernard Perley, Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, Dr. Pasang Dolma Sherpa, Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, and Dr. Pasang Yangjee Sherpa (chair)

COP27 Debrief – Beyond Doomism and Solutionism in Response to Climate Change

December 9, 2022

Based on the University Affairs OpED with the same title, this panel presents the experiences of Indigenous and racialized UBC delegates at COP27 and problematizes the approaches of climate doomism and climate solutionism in responses to the climate and nature emergency (CNE), focusing on how both approaches discourage engagement with the complexities of the CNE.

Panelists:  Dr. Vanessa Andreotti, Dr. Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, Dr. Shannon Waters, Dr. Sharon Stein (chair) and student coordinator Charlotte Taylor.

You can read the introduction to the panel (which unfortunately was not recorded) here.