IGC Next Meeting: Wednesday, OCT 1, 5:30-6:30, Starbucks, CUB

Please mark your calendars!

Native & Indigenous Graduate Council Meeting
DATE: 10/1/08

TIME: 5:30-6:30

PLACE: Starbucks, WSU CUB

Meeting: Wednesday 09/24/08

Who Attended: Ayano Ginoza, David Warner, Erika Abad, Adriana Black, Jorge Tapia, Margo Tamez
Where: Starbucks, CUB
When: 5:30-6:45

IGC We Are Back!

I. Reviewed decisions from last meeting--GENERALLY

• Name Change: Native American & Indigenous Graduate Council--Ancestral Ways of Knowing

• To make visible the 'responsibilities' ethic of indigenous consciousness by working in collaboratively on inequalities, injustices, and continuing racism against Native peoples and cultures in WSU systems.
  

• Take up the work of continued education and pro-active posture. Follow up on letter to President Floyd, and relevant faculty, staff, admin.

• World Civilization course. Develop a written critique of the current curriculum which continues to degrade, dehumanize and devalue the cultures, ways, and lifeways of Native American and Indigenous peoples. We see this course as an example of the contradictory messages WSU continues to perpetuate about its relationships with MOU tribes, tribal peoples, and native peoples.

• Develop a web presence.

• Outreach to coalitionaly communities in multiple learning communities. How?

1. Connect to other Native and Indigenous graduate student organizations in our region and hemispherically.
2. Work on 'ancestral ways of knowing' as a consciousness and a mechanism for strengthening relationships, renewing commitments, invigorating our vision for community empowerment as graduate researchers.
3. Work on projects which excite our research interests and continue to innovate self-reliance and self-determination.
   
4. Create new access and multiple visibilities: Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Wiki, Sharepoint, ....
   

II. Business Today

• We have approximately $500.00 in our Registered Student Organization account.

• Bolivian visitors to WSU. IGC will sponsor them as our guests. Adriana is the point person.

• Proposed: Host scholars from Mexico. Presentation: Plan Mexico/Merida.

• Build coalitional relationships with other campus communities with similar interests in these research, learning and inter-cultural exchanges.

• Outreach to Undergraduate Native students. David raised potential for linking our desire for a Native people popular "conference" with transparancy and student-led and run, and that undergraduate students are also discussing this idea among themselves too. Can we bring our concerns and goals with the undergraduate community and build a coalition?

• Native Expo, November 7, 2008. Place: CUB Junior Ballroom. Concerns raised about the lack of inclusion, consultation and minimal advance notice to graduate researchers. Graduate researchers are working on situtating and bringing indigenous struggles and consciousness of communities into the research environment. New paradigms are necessary to promote Native graduate research interests, capacities, innovations, ideations, and futures.

III. Indigenous Ancestral Way of Knowing: Goals for the Year

• To work on re-inspiring and re-visioning our lives as researchers and active responders to the lives and realities of native and indigenous communities here in the academic community, to bring our communities here with us and to sustain our self-determination movements and community strengthening in diverse ways, and bringing more balance to our whole lives as native and indigenous peoples. One Project toward this end. (September--October...)

• To strengthen communication and community building among our collective membership at all levels of our organization. One Project toward this end. (November--December...)

• To renew and energize our commitments to our research communities and to share the intense inspirations and products of our work. (January--March...)

• To honor, regard, respect and validate the roles of mentors, allies, through the giving of an award as a 'gift' to a special person who deserves recognition from native and indigenous graduate researchers working toward self-determination.

We are a pro-peoples, pro-communties, pro indigenous knowledges, and pro-transparency organization of allied native and indigenous researchers ... and respected friends.