Joseph Aguilar to speak at Penn

Joseph "Woody" Aguilar (Ph.D. 2019), will speak at the Anthropology Colloquium on Sept 30, 2024. 

This discussion will explore the braided ways that Native people assert Indigenous epistemologies across the museum field today, and will interrogate the cultural, and political complexities Native people face within the field. The discussion is oriented around key issues relating to how Indigenous peoples engage with the museum field and how settler colonialism shapes that engagement. The ways in which Indigenous legal and political status within the United States shape the methodological approach towards engagement and contestations within the field will also be explored though specific case studies which will highlight the tensions and intersections that exist between theoretical and methodological approaches within critical Indigenous Studies and archaeology. In addressing these issues, I hope to attend to the unique conditions of Indigenous governance and sovereignty and the entangled contemporary relationship between self-determination, epistemology, ontology, and coloniality within the museum field.

The talk will be in Museums 345, with a light lunch served at 11:50 and the presentation at 12:00. Sponsored by Penn Native American and Indigenous Studies Program