Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2021 Keynote: Kinship with Stars: Cherokee Stories of Celestial Relation

Credit: Hofstra University

While Indigenous studies is often preoccupied with the relationship between land, bodies, and people, many Indigenous stories describe communal relationships with the stars. This presentation will explore how kinship can be expressed as a relationship with land and other-than-human beings, but also with stars. These celestial relations are part of Indigenous traditions of emergence and endurance, and as such can teach us how to imagine future worlds.

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” Along with S.J. Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds.

This annual event is co-sponsored by Hofstra’s Center for Civic Engagement, the Hofstra Cultural Center, the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice, Rabinowitz Honors College, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.