Agenda
9:30 AM — Registration
10:15 AM — Indigenous Land Acknowledgement + Introduction
10:30 AM — Dr. LaNada War Jack
11:15 AM — Dr. Sara Clarke Kaplan
12:00 PM — Lunch
12:45 AM — Roundtable Panel:
Victoria Castillo, Community Organizer
Yesenia Curiel, CARE Director / City of Merced Parks and Recreation Commissioner
Manar Harran, Community Organizer & Activist
Marissa Martinez, UCM Undergraduate Student
Clara Medina Maya, UCM Undergraduate Student
Rodolfo Rodriguez, UCM Graduate Student Breakout Session
1:45 PM — Breakout Session
3:00 PM — Thank You + Conclusion
About
On November 6, 1968, the Black Student Union and a coalition of other student organizations known as the Third World Liberation Front (twLF) at San Francisco State led what would become the longest student-campus strike in U.S. history. Ending on March 20, 1969, the strike, which included police violence against protesters and made national news, provided the foundation for the creation of the College of Ethnic Studies. It inspired other student-led strikes and the establishment of ethnic studies classes, programs, and departments in universities across the country. Students sacrificed their education, bodies, and livelihood to demand equal access to higher education; more faculty of color; and curriculum that reflected their histories (as well as literatures, philosophies, and arts) and people. Thirty years later, students at UC Berkeley demonstrated, went on a hunger strike, and occupied campus buildings to protest continued budget cuts to ethnic studies. Today’s two keynote speakers will discuss their involvement in and impact of these seminal student-led strikes, demonstrations, and acts of resistance.
Dr. LaNada War Jack is a member of the Shoshone Bannock Tribes where she lives on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and graduated with honors in an Independent Major of Native American Law & Politics. At UC Berkeley, she participated in the UC statewide effort to establish Native, Black, Chicano and Asian Studies. In 1969, she and other Native students throughout California took over Alcatraz Island—later joined by Native activists from across the country—in peaceful protest of the federal government’s ill treatment of Native people and broken treaties with tribes. Dr. War Jack completed a Masters in Public Administration and a Doctorate in Political Science at Idaho State University. She has served as the Executive Director for the Shoshone Bannock Tribes for three years and presently the President of Indigenous Visions Network. Dr. War Jack is currently a Distinguished Professor at Boise State University teaching federal Indian Law/Tribal Government and editing her forthcoming book (next month), entitled Colonization Battlefield: A Native American Historical and Personal Perspective on Oppression, Survival and Resistance.
Dr. Sara Clarke Kaplan is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies and Director of Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is also a founder and Associate Director of UCSD’s Black Studies Project, an interdisciplinary research collaborative. A scholar of feminist and queer theory and African Diaspora literary and cultural production, she is also committed to activism and advocacy around issues of reproductive justice, prison abolition, and Black freedom. She played a vital role in the 1999 student-led strike in support of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. Her book, The Black Reproductive: Feminism and the Politics of Freedom is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.
