Scholar’s Night: Indigenous Academia

Ailene Bass currently does archival work with MIGIZI Communications and the American Indian Movement Interpretive Center. She is a student at the University of Minnesota, pursuing English and anthropology. Ailene’s interests include culturally land-based teachings, poetry, and studying Dakota language. She is also an associate with the On Native Lands Program at the Bell Museum. Her tribal communities are the Hunkpapa Lakota of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the Mvskoke Creek Nation, and the Sac & Fox Nation of Oklahoma, where she is enrolled.

Mads Goodwin Clark (they/any) is the associate director of the Lealtad-Suzuki Center for Social Justice at Macalester College, where they support students who are 2SLGBTQIA+, first-gen, or low-income as well as Native and Indigenous students. They are currently interested in the role of ceremony, spiritualism, and witchcraft in early “American” history as well as the Wa-Wan Press and the feigned Indianist movement in music. Clark is a committee member with the Macalester Native & Indigenous Initiative (MNI) and is currently leading the third iteration of the MNI community building seminar. Most recently, they have worked with Natchez Beaulieu, Waabigwanikwe to create an Indigenous Land Mural on Macalester’s campus.

Kehau Fagatele-Folau (she/they/ia) is a Madau-Moana (Pohnpeian-Tongan) scholar and currently serving as the Macalester Native & Indigenous (MNI) Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Macalester College in Educational Studies. Their scholarship and research draw from the epistemologies and pedagogies of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific, and utilizes culturally relevant method/ologies such as talanoa (Tongan for talk story), iroir (Pohnpeian for reflection), and hohoko (Tongan for genealogy) in her work. Before joining Macalester, Fagatele-Folau completed a postdoctoral research fellowship for the Research Collaborative for Higher Education in Prison at the University of Utah, where she also earned all her post-secondary degrees.

Kiri Sailiata (she/her) is a professor of Indigenous studies at Macalester College where she has taught since 2019. She serves as a faculty affiliate of the Mississippi River Open School and the Macalester Native and Indigenous Initiative (MNI). Her teaching and research focus on Pacific history, environmental justice, visual culture, and transnational feminisms with an emphasis on public engagement and community-based research and teaching practices. She received her PhD and MA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in American Culture and her BA from Macalester College. Sailiata was a UC postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. She was a member and national collective colead of INCITE! Women and Trans* People of Color Against Violence.

Layla Zbinden (they/them) is a Walin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Macalester College. They hold a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from University of Southern California. Their research explores grief, chronic illness, and articulations of pain by transnational Arab feminists; rerouting medical knowledge production through post- and anti-colonial pathways. They are also a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and have worked in Palestinian grassroots organizing since 2019.

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