Thursday, May 2, 2013
4:00 pm
Communication 120

Comunidades afectadas por la minería: el caso CONACAMI y su impacto en América
In November 1998, community leaders from the Peruvian Andes came together in a seminar to discuss the effects of mining in their communities. This could have simply been one more meeting, but the conclusions and agreements of this historic gathering opened a new chapter in the long struggle of Andean communities to defend their rights against the mining industry and state mining policies. This new stage is marked by the leadership of the National Confederation of Communities Affected by Mining in Peru (Confederación Nacional de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería – CONACAMI) and the emergence of a movement to denounce the negative impacts of mining and organize opposition to it. This movement is considered one of the iconic articulations of resistance to mining in Latin America. Its most important contribution is generating a public debate over the impacts and benefits of mining.

Luis Vittor is a Peruvian economist and adviser to the Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas (Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations). He has also advised the Confederación de Comunidades del Perú Afectadas por la Minería (CONACAMI, the Confederation of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining) since its founding. He is of Quechua origin and was born in Cerro de Pasco, Peru. From 2008-2009 he was a Fellow in the Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights, Governance & International Cooperation program at the University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain). He is the author of Resistencias comunitarias a la minería: la experiencia de CONACAMI (Community Resistance to Mining: the CONACAMI experience) (2008) among numerous other publications.
Presentation will be in Spanish with English translation by José Antonio Lucero (Latin American and Caribbean Studies).

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).
For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and www.borderingviolence.com.

Friday April 12, 2013
10:00 am
Location: Communications 206

Contact:  lasuw@uw.edu or 206.685.3435

Borderlands Graduate Student Coffee hour with Audra Simpson and Ofelia Zepeda. Come meet Profs. Simpson and Zepeda for an informal chat with other graduate students interested in borderlands research.

Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).

For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and www.borderingviolence.com

Thursday, April 11, 2013
4:00 pm, reception to follow
Communications 120
University of Washington, Seattle Campus

Audra Simpson (Anthropology, Columbia University) “Indian Territory, the Racialized Life of Treaty and Settler Sovereignty”

Haudenosaunee – or “The Iroquois” – are an Indigenous Confederacy of Six Nations that interrupt the narratives that attempts to explain them as well as the states that purport to lawfully own and administer their land. Nowhere is this made clearer than in Iroquois interpretations of the Jay Treaty of 1794 and Iroquois movement across the US-Canada border—an international border that cuts through their historical and contemporary territory and is, simply, in their space and in their way. It is through their actions, and in particular, their mobility on their own terms, that Indigenous border crossers enact their understandings of history and law, understandings that are then received in particular ways – racializing, criminalizing, and delimiting. Nonetheless, Haudenosaunee push against all of this as they move across various borders: territorial, temporal and juridical, in their active relationships to land and to each other.  Audra Simpson explores the historica! l, legal, political and ethnographic life of Iroquois nationhood across borders, and contends that their continued life and action calls into deep question the conceit of territorial certainty and settler sovereignty itself.

Ofelia Zepeda (American Indian Studies, University of Arizona) “The Tohono O’odham and the Border: A Personal Perspective”

Ofelia Zepeda is a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation. She contends, “Early on we were not really aware of an international border since movement between the U.S. and Mexico was fairly free, especially for the Tohono O’odham. The understanding of a political border is something fairly recent and does not come into play when one moves with family and kin back and forth in this desert space, where the political border is situated is all one great extension of a people’s home, culture, language and land. This in a sense is my perspective as a member of the O’odham Nation. But, things have changed.” In her talk, she shares her personal perspective, moving back and forth from the time before the true realization of a border and today when things are magnified by the border.
Presented as part of B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas, a John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-sponsored by the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program, the Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, & Sexuality (WISER).
For more on the B/ordering Violence Seminar Series, visit depts.washington.edu/uwch/programs/initiatives/bordering-violence and  www.borderingviolence.com.