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?
- Connect to other Native and Indigenous graduate student organizations in our region and hemispherically.
- 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.
- Work on projects which excite our research interests and continue to innovate self-reliance and self-determination.
- 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.
2 comments:
Good work getting together on short notice.
It would be helpful to post meeting time on list serve so that folks now back on campus could come if they wanted. I would have liked to know the meeting time, it would have been easier to participate via speaker phone.
Remember there are other members that have children too, and during the summer was not workable for them - out of town, etc. We may be able to get there participation now.
Posting initial call to re-register also would have got more people to log onto the RSO portal to get them to cyber join our group for numbers and show the wider spread interest. This can still be done to add numbers.
We need to establish a bi-weekly time for a set meeting if possible and get this posted on the MSS Native web page and put up notice in all the centers to encourage more membership.
Also it is doable to have the banner done by Oct. 6th when the Bolivian group comes. Will post worked on image here if possible or send to list serve if possible.
Remember everyone is on the list serve except new people which Debbie can put on right away still an easy way to get info to all members. We need to be accessible to everyone. This meeting time was exclusive to who was in our department, not the whole group - we need to be completely transparent for all.
Thanks again to Adrianna for keeping the RSO happy with us being an "active" group, and Margo for getting the notes up right away.
Best - Michelle
Dear Michelle:
Can you and/or Debbie provide us with a list of all the email addresses of all the currently enrolled IGC members? Would be good to 'see' who we are.
We didn't have a 'real' time until the last minute, and we would definitely like to be more organized. Out of consideration for the full membership out there, we didn't want to set a meeting, unless we knew someone from the officers: David, you, myself, Ayano, Erika, would actually be able to meet. It just happened at about 5:00 that we knew for sure. Thanks for your helpful suggestions.
You've given me an idea. Especially now that you have officially joined the ranks of "parents"! Would be good to know how many members we have who have childcare concerns and meetings. We would need to share cell phone minutes equitably, in order to bring folks in on speaker phone. That time can be very expensive, and if that is desired by folks, perhaps Debbie Brudie can help us find ways to bridge the communication needs of members. At the same time, we need to know ahead of time too, who exactly needs that service, because it would be difficult to guarantee anyone that we could pull that off at short notice. I'm not sure I could have my cell phone available for a long period of time without reimbursement. I'd be willing to do it for 10 minutes or so. What do others think about the issue that Michelle is raising?
We discussed a need to set a regular time for meetings. However, the group did not pick up that thread at the end of the meeting.
What we did establish however, is that we will meet next Wednesday again, same place same time. I forgot to put that in the notes.
My bad!
I'll post that to the list right now.
I'll ask Norma Joseph to put our blog link on the Native web page.
Also, just to give boost to those who made it to the meeting to tie up important strings for issue facing us RIGHT NOW, there was not intention to exclude anyone! Actually, we did tell folks who we saw. I hope folks continue to check their list email and check in with this blog. The blog is a tool to help us be more tranparant and to share responsibility.
No exclusion of any kind was intended. Last year, at the last meeting, we did decide as a group that even if only 2 people meet, those 2 persons have the right to move our agenda forward. We can't stall our progress any longer to gain more input. The people who show up are the ones who lead for the day. We discussed this right up front at the meeting last night, just to remind ourselves of those important understandings.
Take care!
Margo
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