The American Indian Studies Department at UNC Pembroke will host the 17th annual Southeast Indian Studies Conference March 31 -April 1.
The event will take place virtually. The conference will showcase presentations by scholars and community members on topics including Indigenous medical perspectives, identity, higher education, sovereignty and self-governance, among other subjects involving Southeast Native peoples.
Admission is free and open to the public; however, registration is required to receive a Zoom link. To register, visit www.uncp.edu/ais/sisc
The keynote speaker for this year’s conference is Robert A. Williams, Jr., an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. He serves as Regents Professor E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Chair of the University of Arizona Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program.
The topic of his presentation is “Indigenizing Critical Race Theory: The Right to Recognition and Indigenous Human Rights.”
Professor Williams received his B.A. from Loyola College (1977) and his J.D. from Harvard Law School (1980). He is the author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (1990), which received the Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Center Award as one of the outstanding books published in 1990 on the subject of prejudice in the United States.
He has written Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800 (1997), Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights and the Legal History of Racism in America (2005), and Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). He is co-author of Federal Indian Law: Cases and Materials (7th ed., with David Getches, Charles Wilkinson, Matthew Fletcher, and Kristen Carpenter, 2017). He received the Lawrence R. Baca Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Federal Indian Law in 2017 from the Federal Bar Association Indian Law Section. He was named the first Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (2003-2004), having previously served there as Bennet Boskey Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Law.
The 2006 recipient of the University of Arizona Koffler Prize for Outstanding Accomplishments in Public Service, and the 2020 recipient of the University of Arizona Gerald G. Swanson Prize for Teaching Excellence, Professor Williams has received major grants and awards from the Soros Senior Justice Fellowship Program of the Open Society Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Institute of Justice, the Ford Foundation and NDN Collective.
Interviewed by Bill Moyers and quoted on the front page of the New York Times, Professor Williams has represented tribal groups and members before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, the United States Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of Canada. Professor Williams served as Chief Justice for the Court of Appeals, Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation, and as Justice for the Court of Appeals and trial judge pro tem for the Tohono O’odham Nation.
The conference serves as a venue for scholars, students and all persons interested in American Indian Studies in the region. It is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs, the Museum of the Southeast American Indian and the Southeast American Indian Studies Program.
Attendees needing accommodation to access the program or program materials should contact Dr. Mary Ann Jacobs at mary.jacobs@uncp.edu no later than five business days prior to the program. However, a good faith effort will be made for any request made less than five days in advance.
A full schedule and a registration link to the conference can be found at www.uncp.edu/ais/sisc. For more information, contact Jacobs at mary.jacobs@uncp.edu or the Department of American Indian Studies at ais@uncp.edu or 910.521.6266.
