"Stepping In it: A Multi-Sensory Method to Native Studies and Decolonization."

 

Drawing from my contribution in a forthcoming volume on  Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (Routledge, 2017), edited by the Ojibwe Historian, Jean O'Brien, and the Métis Sociologist, Chris Andersen, my talk fuses the systematicity and rigor of the social sciences and humanities with what might be called the Native's penchant for (if not art of) creative disruption and mischief, to present an appropriate method of scholarship forged in relation to political struggles for Indigenous nation-building such as the Chamorro quest for self-determination and sovereignty.

 

Vicente M. Diaz is on the faculty of American Indian Studies and History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. A Filipino and Carolinian (Pohnpei) born and raised on Guam, Diaz attended UOG while playing football for the Tritons in the late 1970s, and returned after schooling in Hawai'i and California to teach Pacific History and Micronesian Studies at UOG from 1991 to 2001.  Since then, Diaz has taught Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan and Comparative Native Studies at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign before accepting his present position in 2015. In the 1990s, Diaz served as the Historian for the Hale'ta Our Roots textbooks produced by the Guam Political Status Education Coordinating Commission, and was instrumental in helping revive traditional seafaring in Guam. He is the author of Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam (University of Hawaii, 2010) and the Writer/Director and Co-producer of Sacred Vessels: Navigating Tradition and Identity in Micronesia (29 mins, VHS 1997).