Join Us for Our New Guest Speaker Series

Hosted by Indian Education, the first event, Indigenous from the Americas: Building Solidarity between Latinos and American Indian People will take place on Wednesday, May 26, from 5:45-7:45 p.m.

Guest Speaker Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico is a Pirinda-P’urhepecha Indigenous scholar who serves as an Assistant Professor of Chicano Latino Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota --Twin Cities. Her research explores how representations of Indigenous people in Mexican popular culture inform Mexican understandings of race and ethnicity. Dr. Spears-Rico is currently working on her first book, Mestizo Melancholia and the Legacy of Conquest in Michoacan, which explores how ‘going native’ functions in Mexico. She authored “Decolonial P’urhepecha Motherwork as Pedagogy,” in The Chicana Motherwork Anthology and “In the Time of War and Hashtags: Rehumanizing Indigeneity in the Digital Landscape” in Indigenous Interfaces, both published in 2019 by the University of Arizona Press. Most recently, her work appears in Sparked: George Floyd, Racism and the Progressive Illusion (MNHS Press, 2021) and in Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo (Pittsburg University Press, 2021). Dr. Spears-Rico is the winner of numerous national awards, including the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the ALCS Fellowship in Native American and Indigenous Studies, and the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. She was also recently awarded a residency with the Institute for Advanced Study and was named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor by the University of Minnesota. A West-Coast transplant, Dr. Spears-Rico has lived in Minnesota since 2013; she is the proud mother of a strong-willed Ojibwe-Dakota-Mexican girl named Miskikwe and is a godmother of four and an auntie to 25 nieces and nephews. She lives with her family in Saint Paul.

We hope you can join us for what is sure to be an informative event! Details to access the virtual session can be found on the district calendar at rdale.org/discover/calendars