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Speakers: Selene Manga, Takemi Fellow in International Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Emil’ Keme, Humanities Fellow in Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; Julie Fiveash, Librarian for American Indigenous Studies at Tozzer Library, Harvard University; Sharoll Fernández Siñani, Artist, Member of the Jichha Collective and Master’s student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education
Moderated by: Américo Mendoza-Mori, Lecturer in Latinx Studies and Faculty Director, Latinx Studies Working Group at Harvard University Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR)
This event will showcase the work of scholars on Indigeneity in contemporary contexts and across disciplines at Harvard University.
Dr. Selene Manga grew up in an indigenous community in Cusco, Peru. After finishing medical school in 1991, she received a scholarship to study epidemiology and biostatistics at John Hopkins University. In Peru, she began working as a physician and clinician of tropical diseases. She became Executive Director of a hospital before becoming involved with Doctors Without Borders. She worked for one year in Ukraine, running multi drug resistant tuberculosis programs and HIV preparedness programs in prisons. After, she travelled to Mozambique to help restart the Doctors Without Borders volunteer program for HIV prevention in sex workers that was destroyed in a natural disaster. Creating a “one stop shop” program in the hospital for HIV education, prevention, and testing, her team successfully recovered 90% of the program’s previous participants. After her work in Mozambique, she moved to Papua New Guinea where she served as the team leader for a program to fight one of the worst pandemics of multi drug resistant tuberculosis in the island. After returning to Peru, she began looking into mobile intensive care units all around the country, especially in those areas where vulnerable population are living. Her research for the Takemi program will focus on the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the outcome of multi drug resistant TB patients. She hopes to examine worldwide health policies to determine their effectiveness.
Emil’ Keme, a.k.a. Emilio del Valle Escalante, is an Indigenous K’iche’ Maya scholar and activist and a professor in the Department of English at Emory University. He is a member of the Maya anti-colonial, binational collective Ix’balamquej Junajpu Wunaq’. While at Radcliffe, Keme is working on a monograph, tentatively titled “Abiayala, a Trans-hemispheric Indigenous Manifesto,” in which he examines Indigenous struggles for self-determination in various parts of Abiayala (the Indigenous ancestral name of the Americas). Through comparative analyses, his work aims to highlight the potentialities of building trans-hemispheric Indigenous alliances by critically exploring the field of Indigenous studies, settler colonial borders, Indigenous forced migration, Indigenous approaches to environmental justice, and Indigenous women and LGBTQ2s+ rights. Keme is the author of Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), which won Cuba’s prestigious Premio Literario Casa de las Américas in 2020, and Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala: Coloniality, Modernity, and Identity Politics (University of New Mexico Press, 2009). He has also published edited volumes and numerous articles on Indigenous rights. Keme volunteers as a cultural advisor for the International Mayan League, in Washington, DC, an Indigenous women–led organization that works for the rights of Indigenous migrants from South America in the United States. He earned an MA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.
Julie Fiveash is Kinyaa'áanii born for Naakai Dine'é. Their maternal grandfather's clan is Táchii'nii and their paternal grandfather's clan is Bilagaana. Julie's pronouns are they/them/theirs and they identify as non-binary. They received their BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College in 2013. They graduated from UCLA with an MLIS in 2021 where they focused on Indigenous Librarianship and worked as an Archival Assistant at UCLA's American Indian Studies Center Library. They recently completed an internship at the Smithsonian Center Folklife and Cultural Heritage, researching Indigenous Language use within the Smithsonian Folkways Festival archives. Their interests include Indigenous librarianship, Indigenous publishing, community archives, zine making, and comic books.
Sharoll Fernandez Siñani is an Aymara woman born in Bolivia who recognizes herself as india, artist, writer, and educator. Sharoll, whose artistic name is Osnat Siñani, published her first art book and poetry collection, “From the Center,” in 2020. She co-founded Bolivian Express, the most critical Bolivian sociocultural publication written in English. She is a member of the Jichha political and social analysis group. She is a founding member of the Aymara women's group Las Caras de Llama. She founded and now leads the non-profit educational organization Zera Bolivia. She believes that education, as life, is only cultivated optimally if we become aware of and fight for basic human needs: survival, somatic well-being, freedom of mind, and identity of the spirit. Sharoll cares to emphasize a critical, creative, and overcoming perspective of colonialism in her work with Zera Bolivia. She simultaneously gives rise to spaces that prioritize conversations and action regarding the sexuality spectrum, the role of women, and the effects of racism in Bolivian society. Sharoll has been accepted at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the Education Policy and Analysis Masters program with a concentration on Identity, Power, and Justice in Education. She will initiate her studies in August 2022.
Américo Mendoza–Mori is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. His research focuses on Latin American, U.S. Latinx, and Indigenous issues. Mendoza-Mori’s work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, has been presented at the United Nations, and has been featured in The New York Times, a TEDx talk, NPR, Remezcla. He received his BA from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima (Peru), and has a PhD from the University of Miami, Florida. Before joining Harvard, Dr. Mendoza-Mori took on innovative leadership roles: founder and coordinator of the University of Pennsylvania’s Quechua program, co-founder of The Quechua Alliance, and co-founder of the Thinking Andean Studies international conference. He has been a cultural consultant for theater and film, including Paramount Pictures’ movie Dora and the Lost City of Gold in 2019. Additionally, he has been involved in educational and community-based initiatives in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and the United States. At EMR, he plans to teach courses on Transnational Cultural Studies, Education and Language, and Critical Latinx Indigeneities. For Fall 2021 he will teach the course “Topics on Latinx Studies”, and the seminar “COVID-19, Inequality and the Latinx community.” On Spring 2022 he will teach a seminar on “Indigeneity and Latinidad”.
Presented in collaboration with Harvard University Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR) and Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP)