How can art engender liberating ways of knowing, imagining, and ultimately producing the world? And what is the role of indigenous scientific literacies in this endeavor? In face of the decadence of Progress as the modern world’s civilizational compass, scholar Grace Dillon and artist Suzanne Kite will engage in a conversation to explore different aspects of indigenous artistic and scientific engagements with reality to delve for alternative worlds, futures, and temporalities, which will be able to account for a more-than-human endurance through time. 

Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe) is Professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Department in the School of Gender, Race, and Nations and also Affiliated Professor at the English and Women, Gender, and Sexualities Departments at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. She teaches courses on a range of subjects such as Indigenous Futurisms; Native American and Indigenous studies; Gender, Race, and Nations theories and methodologies; climate and environmental justice; reparations justice; resurgence justice; Indigenous cinema; popular culture, race and social justice; and early modern literature. She is a Senior co-editor of the upcoming Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2022) and editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012) and Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (Oregon State University Press, 2003). 

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Women at Sundance x Adobe Fellow.

Funded in part by the NSSR Dean’s Office and the University Student Senate.

Attendees will receive access to the Zoom link via email once they register.