Higher Education’s Role in Serving Indigenous Communities – An Indigenous Peoples’ Day Program

Cedric Woods is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. He combines over a decade of tribal government experience with a research background, and has served as the director of INENAS since 2009.

The institute's purpose is to connect Native New England with university research, innovation, and education. Currently, Cedric is working on projects with tribes in the areas of tribal government capacity building, Indian education, economic development, and chronic disease prevention.

Prior to arriving at UMass Boston, Cedric completed a study on the evolution of tribal government among the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. While pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of Connecticut, he served in a variety of capacities for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. These positions included director of career development, research analyst, tribal government spokesman, and deputy chief operating officer.

Cedric has served as a consultant for the National Museum of the American Indian, the Haliwa SaponiIndian Tribe of North Carolina, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Plimoth Plantation, a bicultural living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Dr. Sonya Atalay (Anishinaabe-Ojibwe) is an Indigenous archaeologist, utilizing community-based participatory methods to conduct research in full partnership with Indigenous communities. Dr. Atalay’s scholarship crosses disciplinary boundaries, incorporating aspects of cultural anthropology, archaeology, critical heritage studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She’s currently involved in producing a series of research-based comics about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act(NAGPRA) law.

In her most recent work, Dr. Atalay is exploring ways that repatriation and reclaiming of tangible and intangible heritage are teachers that provides essential lessons for decolonizing and Indigenizing institutions. This work will be published in her forthcoming “Braiding Knowledge: How Indigenous Knowledge is Challenging and Changing Universities” which will be published by University of Arizona Press.

Dr. Atalay’s work examines how repatriation can contribute to healing from historical trauma. Centering Anishinaabe epistemologies and concepts of well-being, Dr. Atalay is working on a series of land-based collaborative projects that involve intergenerational Indigenous knowledge production and knowledge mobilization practices. Working with Indigenous youth and elders, she explores collaborative production of comics, animation, and virtual reality applications as part of 21st century Indigenous story work processes.