Stewards of the Earth: Exploring Federal Land Protection from an Indigenous Perspective

Feb 20 2019
When: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Harman Academy
Event Type: Workshop

Event Details

“As long as the grass shall grow and rivers flow, you can have your land.” 

These were the empty promises issued by the United States government to Indigenous peoples as they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands during the 19th century. 

 

“Protect Sacred Places.”

These words inform the political actions of present day Indigenous leaders to reclaim and protect their rightful, sacred lands.

 

For our second session in the 4Ps series, we are thrilled to have Angela Mooney D’Arcy, (Juaneno Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation) join us in conversation on the ongoing fight to protect and secure sites that are sacred to Indigenous peoples here in Southern California and across the American continent. Our nation’s shameful history of dispossession, broken promises, removal, and settler colonialism is thankfully not the end of the story.  Professor D’Arcy and Indigenous leaders like her are building the political acumen and collectiveness of Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples to reclaim and protect their sacred lands, waters and cultures.  We invite our polymathic community to listen, learn and engage Professor D’Arcy on the issues of Indigenous people’s rights to lands that in truth have always been theirs. 

 

Joining Professor D’Arcy, we are pleased to have Elizabeth Logan, Ph.D., J.D., a legal historian speaking to federal law, and moderator Hanna Fahsholtz, a senior majoring in narrative studies and trip lead in the Peaks and Professors student organization.  

 

In preparation for the discussion, we ask that you view this short film on Genga, one of the Indigenous sacred spaces in Southern California Professor D’Arcy has been working to protect. 

Speaker Information

Speaker

Angela Mooney D'Arcy

Angela Mooney D’Arcy (Juaneno Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation) has been working with Tribal Nations, Indigenous peoples, and grassroots organizations on Indigenous environmental justice issues for over fourteen years. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, a Los Angeles-based, Indigenous-led organization that works to build the capacity of Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples to protect sacred lands, waters, and cultures. She is also the Co-Director of the United Coalition to Protect Panhe (UCPP), a grassroots alliance of Acjachemen people dedicated to the protection of their sacred sites.

She serves on the Board of the Blas Aguilar Adobe Museum & Acjachemen Cultural Center and secured funding from the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, Mobilizing Communities through the Arts initiative to support monthly traditional cultural programming for tribal members at the museum in San Juan Capistrano, CA. She also teaches Native American Law through the Ethnic Studies Department at University of California, Riverside, and teaches Indigenous Cultural Resource Law in Theory and Practice through UCLA Extension and the TLCEE Working in Tribal Communities program.

She is a recipient of the New Voices Fellowship, a national Ford Foundation-funded program dedicated to cultivating the next generation of social justice leaders, the Earthjustice Sutherland Fellowship, awarded each year to a young lawyer to continue their work in environmental public-interest law, and is a member of the 2012 Circle of Leadership Academy sponsored by Native Americans in Philanthropy and the Center for Leadership Innovation. She received her B.A. from Brown University and received her JD, with a concentration in Critical Race Studies and Federal Indian Law, from UCLA School of Law.

Elizabeth A. Logan

Elizabeth A. Logan received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in History with honors, her JD from the UCLA School of Law, and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She serves as the Associate Director of ICW and the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Service Academy (LASA). Her previous work includes positions as an Assistant Editor of Boom: A Journal of California and as a Dornsife Preceptor. Her teaching and work explores the intersections of law, history and culture in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States and American West.