Authors Meet Critics: "Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims"

Recorded on April 4, 2025, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims, by Shari Huhndorf, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

Professor Shari Huhndorf was joined in conversation by Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor of History of Art at UC Berkeley, and Luanne Redeye, Assistant Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley, moderated.

The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars.

The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender (CRG) and the Department of Ethnic Studies, the History of Art Department, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues.

About the Book

Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely neglected, even in Native organizing, as a pressing concern associated with the status of Indigenous people in settler nation-states. The cultural works discussed in this book provide an urgent Indigenous feminist rethinking of Native politics that exposes the innate gendered dimensions of ongoing settler colonialism. They insist that Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights must entail gender justice for Native women.

A transcript of this panel is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/native-lands.