Notice Board

The Department of Indigenous Studies is sponsoring an Indigenous Women Speaker Series in partnership with the Galt Museum for the 2023-24 academic year.

Dr. Tina Taitano DeLisle's talk is titled Placental Politics: Rewriting Oceanic Histories of Embodied Land Work, Radical Relationalities, and Indigenous Feminisms.

This talk traces the histories of Indigenous CHamoru women labourers under U.S. military colonialism in Guåhan in the early 20th century and the intersections of their work with the colonial philanthropy of white American women. The talk draws on Indigenous oral histories to argue for a "placental politics" inherent in the work of Indigenous midwives and teachers. Placental politics is an Indigenous feminist theory and anticolonial practice of being and action informed by age-old ideas of self in relation to land and reciprocal kin and community obligations. The talk also explores how these histories of women employing deep knowledge and sacred practices and rituals like placental burial, as a way of safeguarding a child (into adulthood) from harm, can inform decolonization and sovereignty struggles against U.S. colonialism in Guåhan where a new generation of feminist artists enact new and persistent forms of relationalities of caretaking Indigenous peoplehood and place.

Bio: Dr. Tina Taitano DeLisle is an associate professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota where she teaches courses in critical Indigenous studies, Indigenous feminisms, Pacific history, and heritage studies and public history. DeLisle’s book, Placental Politics: CHamoru Women, White Womanhood, and Indigeneity in Guam (UNC Press 2021), offers an Indigenous feminist critique of the historical and cultural work of CHamoru women in relation to the imperial labor and philanthropy of American women stationed in Guåhan in the early twentieth century. Her current project traces the histories of Indigenous land struggles and neocolonial conservation and heritage in national parks and monuments in Micronesia. DeLisle’s public history work includes museum curation and the coproduction of documentaries on the revitalization of Micronesian canoe traditions and pre-World War II histories of Indigenous nurse-midwives in Guåhan. DeLisle is a former elected council member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.