Beyond Bohm 2024, Part 1 – Vortex of Indigenous Cosmologies

Vortex of Indigenous Cosmologies

with Melissa Nelson and friends

Sunday July 28
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST 
2-hour session.

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Melissa K. Nelson is an ecologist and Indigenous scholar-activist. She earned her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California, Davis. Formerly a professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, she now teaches at Arizona State University in the School of Sustainability, Global Futures Laboratory. From 1993 to 2021, she served as the founding executive director and CEO of the Cultural Conservancy. She now serves as their president emerita. Melissa is the Bundle Holder for the Native American Academy. She is a contributor and co-editor of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also a contributor and the editor of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future (2008). She is Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

Terrellyn Fearn is Snake Clan, and a member of Glooscap First Nation in Mi’kma’ki with strong Mi’ kmaq lineage from her paternal grandmother and rich Irish roots from her maternal grandmother. She grew up on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in close relationship with the land and water. As Co-Director of Turtle Island Institute, she brings wisdom and understanding of Indigenous well-being and community building through rematriation and Indigenous ways of knowing. Terrellyn has extensive experience decolonizing programs, Indigenizing practice, and facilitating healing through this lens. Her work over the last 25 years has focused on advancing social justice and systems change in the area of health, gender-based violence, education, and healing. She is privileged to have worked with over 340 rural and urban Indigenous communities throughout Turtle Island.

Terrellyn is a mother and founded her business to provide balance in raising her son and contributing meaningfully to community. She founded Spirit Moon Consulting in 2004 shortly after the World Health Organization launched the first ever World report on violence and health. Spirit Moon was designed to advance healing and well-being through education and training by developing trauma informed curriculum, training design, and delivery that centers Indigenous knowledge and ceremony.

In 2017, she was the Director of Outreach and Support Services for the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and led a 2.5 year process for family members and survivors of violence to share their truth. She is a MEd. candidate at York University and a Research Associate at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation & Resilience (WISIR) focusing on understanding complexity theory, ethical space of engagement, Indigenous feminism, and healing centered design. She sits on the Indigenous Advisory Circle for the Office of the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime focused on the decolonization of the Canadian criminal justice system.

Isabel Hawkins, Senior Scientist (she/her/ella), grew up in Córdoba, Argentina, where the beauty of the night sky and a childhood visit to the Planetario charted the course of her career as an astronomer and science educator. Reaching for the stars, Isabel came to the United States as an American Field Service exchange student when she was sixteen. In 1981, she received a BS in physics from UC Riverside, where she was asked to join Phi Beta Kappa. Subsequently, she obtained an MS and a PhD in astrophysics from UCLA. Before joining the Exploratorium in 2009, she spent 20 years as an astrophysics researcher and science educator at the University of California, Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory. Isabel’s work at the Exploratorium is focused on NASA, NSF, and museum-funded efforts related to Latinx audience engagement, such as Solar Eclipse, GENIAL: Generating Engagement and New Initiatives for All Latinos, and Cambio, a professional development approach for building Latinx-focused cultural competence in museums. Through cultural astronomy, she fosters science pluralism by making visible The Cultural Roots of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a research synthesis effort that has been funded by the NSF. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific bestowed on her the prestigious Klumpke-Roberts Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy, an honor that she shares with fellow awardees Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Julieta Fierro, and Tim Ferris, among others. Isabel is also a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, a volunteer coordinator for the YAKANAL, Indigenous Youth Cultural Exchange program, and a 2018 to 2022 Fulbright US Global Scholar. Her interests include salsa and bachata dancing, yoga, drawing Maya classic period glyphs, and the study of native languages.

Marcus Briggs-Cloud (Maskoke) is a language revitalizer, scholar, and musician. He is co-director of Ekvn-Yefolecv, an Indigenous ecovillage community in Weogufka, Alabama comprised of Maskoke persons who have returned to their ancestral homelands to practice linguistic, cultural, and ecological sustainability. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary ecology at the University of Florida where his work intersects liberation theology, linguistics, ecology, race, and gender identity. He received two Native American Music award nominations for his Maskoke hymn album Pum Vculvke Vrakkuecetv (To Honor Our Elders) and served as composer and choir director for the liturgical canonization of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha by Pope Benedict XVI. He is partnered to Tawna Little (Maskoke) and they have two children, Nokos-Afvnoke and Hemokke, with whom Marcus enjoys speaking exclusively in the Maskoke language.