The 12th Annual American Indian & Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, Indigenous Futures in Higher Education, seeks to prompt conversations that center Indigenous presence in higher education. Historically, higher education has been rooted in multiple modes of colonial violence. Accepted curriculum, culture, and research methods have resulted in the assimilation, erasure, exclusion, and extraction of Indigenous lifeways. Thanks to decades of work resisting institutional oppression, higher education has the potential to be an increasingly integral part of many Indigenous communities. This symposium asks how we best provide tools that foster public policy, environmental agency, and cultural preservation in service of Indigenous communities. How can higher education be a space for Native and Indigenous students to thrive?

We ask for participants to share conversations about how higher education can exist in dialogue with our living communities. This includes Indigenous pedagogies shaping higher education and imagining the futures of the ever-expanding Indigenous higher education experience. Within this context, we seek to simultaneously evaluate the institutional structures built within colonial practices — such as Land Grab Universities, universities violating NAGPRA, and other systemic injustices we must confront — while creating space for Indigenous higher education. We prompt the question, “What is the state of Indigenous higher education, and what are the many futures imagined?”

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS