"Activating Nuxalk Ancestral Governance to Protect the Nuxalk Language with the American Philosophical Society (APS)" with Emily Jean Leischner

The seventh 2024-2025 Indigenous Learning Forum will take place March 20, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. This talk will be given in English with Spanish translation.  

This event is open to all but registration is required.

Emily Jean Leischner is a settler, community-based researcher who studies and works with heritage institutions like museums and archives. In reciprocity with colleagues and friends from the Nuxalk First Nation, (whose territory is on the Northwest Coast of what is also known as British Columbia, Canada), she researches the historical and contemporary appropriation of Nuxalk knowledge and heritage, collaborating on projects that reclaim and uphold Nuxalk sovereignty. 

Activating Nuxalk Ancestral Governance to Protect the Nuxalk Language with the American Philosophical Society (APS)

Indigenous laws and protocols have long been used by tribal nations worldwide to protect knowledge and stories, language and intellectual property, land and belongings. This collaborative project seeks to bring Indigenous laws into the settler archive. Our research team, composed of members of the Nuxalk First Nation Ancestral Governance Office and non-Indigenous scholars, is working with staff at the American Philosophical Society to see whether a shared stewardship contract could be a feasible way to use Nuxalk laws to protect the Nuxalk language documented and preserved at the APS. We hope that this contract will extend Nuxalk sovereignty beyond their territory, to wherever their knowledge and belongings are held around the world. In this talk, one member of the research team will share how this ongoing project came to be, and will discuss the challenges, questions, and successes the team has encountered so far.