Stony Brook Panel Ponders Preservation and Survival of Indigenous Culture

While the way of life of modern America is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, Indigenous and Native American populations are as fortunate, as Indigenous cultures and customs around the world are disappearing at an alarming rate. The United Nations estimates that an Indigenous language goes extinct every two weeks, taking with it unique cultures, knowledge, and identities.

A panel discussion moderated by Joseph Pierce, director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAIS) and associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature, highlighted work Stony Brook researchers are conducting to not only strengthen, but preserve Native American ways of life.

The panel, co-sponsored by NAIS, Diversity, Intercultural and Community Engagement (DICE), and the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, included: Valeria Meiller, assistant professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature; David Heska Wanbli Weiden, professor, Department of English; Darcey Evans, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology, and Vick Quezada, assistant professor, Department of Art. The discussion coincided with the Zuccaire Galleryexhibition, "Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds: The Power of Indigenous Language in Contemporary Art," curated by Jeremy Dennis '13, a Shinnecock artist and Stony Brook graduate.

"We are honored to gather at an exhibition that reminds us that language carries memory, creativity, resistance and legacy," said Judy Jaquez, DICE associate director. "This dialog offers a meaningful opportunity to learn from leading voices in Indigenous Studies relational thinking and community centered scholarship."

"It's really great for us to be having all of these new faculty members here," added Pierce. "When I first arrived at Stony Brook 12 years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Now, not only is it thinkable, but it's happening."

Meiller spoke about her book project, Biodiversity and Linguistic Diversity in 21st-Century Poetry, which examines the interrelation between eco-colonialism and acoustic colonialism. The monograph builds on her ongoing work with Ruge el Bosque, a collective research and publishing initiative focused on environmental and plurilingual poetics.

Ruge el Bosquecomprises six planned plurilingual poetry anthologies that bring together poets from across the territories of Abiayala - the decolonial name used by Indigenous peoples and their allies to refer to the Americas. "The poets anthologized in Ruge el Bosque write across multiple linguistic traditions, but what unites them is their advocacy for land defense," Meiller said. "Their work demonstrates how poetry functions, particularly in Indigenous communities, as a grassroots tool for preserving ecosystems and endangered languages."

Following the publication of volumes dedicated to the Southern Cone and Mesoamerica, Meiller is currently working on a third volume focused on the Amazon rainforest. Future anthologies will address the Andean region, the Caribbean and the Guyanas, and Turtle Island, which she hopes to develop in collaboration with the Algonquian Languages Revitalization Project.

Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation who joined Stony Brook in 2024, spoke about how his work highlights challenges in Native American communities. "As a writer, I believe in the power of narrative to change society," he said. "I believe that stories can change the world, and that's what I try to do."

Weiden's first novel, Winter Counts, was a bestseller named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 greatest thriller novels of all time. "While I'm grateful for that, I'm more grateful and honored by the fact that it actually spurred change in the world."

Weiden cited real, centuries-old problems regarding criminal justice on Native American reservations.

"Criminal Justice administration in these communities is a problem because of a law called the Major Crimes Act, which was passed by the United States Congress in 1885 and is still good law today," he said. "Whenever a felony crime is committed on Native American reservations we must call in the FBI and the US Attorney's offices, and they then have sole and exclusive authority to investigate and prosecute these crimes."

The problem, Weiden said, is that the FBI and US Attorney's offices decline to prosecute 50-70 percent of all felony crimes that take place there. A Native American woman, if she lives on a reservation, has an eight in 10 chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime; men have a four in five chance of being a victim of violence if he lives on reservation.

"What's happening at Native American reservations is that private vigilantes are springing up, such as Virgil, the fictional hero of Winter Counts and my new book Wisdom Corner[to be published July, 2026]," he said. "These vigilantes actually exist. What I found is that the power of narrative and fiction has reached people in a way that I didn't see coming."

Weiden, who is also an attorney, started getting calls from policymakers, congresspeople, policy staffers and academics.

"More than 30 articles have been published by legal academics calling for the repeal and amendment of the Major Crimes Act," he said, adding that the Oglala Sioux tribe filed a successful lawsuit against the federal government to repeal the Major Crimes Act and start adequately funding criminal justice on reservations. "The power of fiction is the power to reach us, the power to touch our hearts. Fiction has a long history of sparking social change, and if I can use this platform and help in some small way, then it'll all be worth it."

Evans isan environmental anthropologist working at the intersections of environmental anthropology and Indigenous Studies, and much of her work has been centered on Indigenous water and salmon stewardship on the west coast. Evans is amember of the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation in Northern California, on the Oregon border.

"Quartz Valley was specifically made to be away from the river and close to the nearby military fort," she said. "But the river remains important to everyone in the region, and up until recently, six dams were constructed on the river. But salmon were unable to make it past the first dam, and every summer, the river filled with toxic algae."

Evans said that witnessing the salmon struggle to survive conditions caused by the dams ignited an interest in thinking about how these infrastructures that are proposed as sustainable and different forms of environmental violence are entangled with functions of sovereignty and territory and power and inequality.

"My research focuses on the ways in which new methods of industrial food production are experienced on the ground, especially for Indigenous communities who live in really close relationship with salmon," she said. "We're seeing all sorts of bad environmental impacts associated with these salmon farms."

Evans spoke of industries like aquaculture, offshore energy, carbon capture technologies, and sea bed mining, all proposed as solutions for moving towards a more sustainable green ocean centric future. "However, in many places that are leaders of this development, from Norway to New Zealand to here on Long Island, coastal waterscapes are subject to pre-existing forms of Indigenous sovereignty and stewardship," she said. "I'm looking at how these efforts to grow ocean-based economies are impacting coastal communities, and how they intersect with Indigenous movements to reclaim the sea as ancestral territory."

Quezada, a mixed media artist who grew up in El Paso, Texas, described her art practice as "autobiographical and historical."

"I'm interested in the politics of land sovereignty as well as the significance of land, and my practice is influenced by my hometown," said Quezada. "El Paso is right over the border and you can see how politically charged it is with the military presence and border patrols. It's ripe with military. My mother's family lived exactly where the US and Mexico intersect, literally on the border. We could look out at the border fence and see the dust cloud [of surveilling border patrols] like a specter of a ghost just hovering over the land."

At home, the disciplined military life of Quezada's grandfather and her mother's Christian beliefs continued to influence the way she looked at citizenship. Being queer in this context added yet another layer of complexity as it challenged the rigid expectations imposed by family members.

"Mapping these intersecting identities required constant negotiation," said Quezada. "It was a way of me to unpack this history and come with being both Spanish and indigenous, and trying to understand what that actually means. Often we see queerness as deprivation, but when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes. It made me curious. It made me ask, 'is this enough for me?'"

- Robert Emproto