The Humanities Council’s Global Initiative, “Land, Language, and Art” is featured on the University homepage among a host of ongoing efforts to expand Native American and Indigenous students and initiatives.
Land, Language, and Art, which began in 2022, fosters reciprocal collaborations with Native American communities through research, artistic productions, academic conferences and more. Sarah Rivett (English and Effron Center for the Study of America) is the project’s director.
The initiative has brought several visiting scholars and speakers to campus since its inception, including playwright, director, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota), who served as a Short-Term Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and Lewis Center for the Arts in Spring 2024. The project also supported last April’s campus visit from Humberto Iglesias Tepec, a Native speaker of Nahuatl, who translated some of Princeton University Library’s manuscripts in early modern Nahuatl as part of Spanish and Portuguese lecturer Nadia Cervantes Pérez’s “Translating Mesoamerica” project, which was also supported by a Humanities Council Magic Project.
In Spring 2025, the initiative will support the undergraduate course “Pacific Archives and Indigenous Cosmologies,” co-taught by Rivett and Branka Arsić (Columbia University), Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America. The course includes a break trip to Juneau and Sitka, Alaska.
The homepage story highlights the recent arrival of professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Effron Center and Anthropology), who will help bridge work related to Indigenous scholarship across disciplines and engage faculty and students around these topics in new ways.
