Dr. Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) will speak on his current work which seeks to draw connections between the ways that Indigenous nations protect cultural resources such as burial sites and other important spaces, and what this might mean for Indigenous political and cultural sovereignty in an era of climate crisis, especially for ‘more-than-human’ parts of the environment.
Dr. Deondre Smiles is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria (B.C., Canada). Dr. Smiles’ research interests are situated at the intersection of critical Indigenous geographies, political ecology, Indigenous cultural resource management, and science/technology studies. Dr. Smiles holds a bachelor’s degree in Geography from St. Cloud State University, a Master of Liberal Studies degree with an emphasis in Global Indigenous Studies from UMD, and a Ph.D. in Geography from The Ohio State University, where he also spent a year as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History.
The Indigenous Environmental Sustainability and Traditional Knowledge Seminar Series hosted by American Indian Studies will provide a series of seminars for the broader UMD community with a focus on environmental science, traditional knowledge, and sustainability by hosting Indigenous scholars and cultural practitioners that couple traditional knowledge with western knowledge systems to address environmental sustainability policies and practices on local, regional, and global scales.