Quentin's Weeknotes 4/27/19-5/3/19

This Week:

• Well, actualy it was last week, but not posted in the chaos…The Yager Museum hosted Amberdawn Lafrance, the Cultural Restoration Manager for the St. Regis Mohawk Nation in Akwesasne, NY. St.Regis/Akwesasne straddles the New York-Canadian Border along the St. Lawrence River. It’s seen an astonishing amount of pollution, development, and environmental degredation over the last 200 years, and the St. Regis Mohawk have recently won some important legal battles to get it cleaned up. Lafrance talked about the results of one of those battles, which is the Cultural Restoration program she heads. The program brings together Mohawk youth and elders, where the former learn important environmental, subsistence, and cultural practices from the latter–a form of cultural revitalization that doubles as environmental restoration. Plus, the course is taught entirely in the Mohawk language. It was an inspiring and insightful look into what sustainability looks like from an Indigenous perspective, and was a great capstone to our year-long Indigenous Speakers series.
• The Reigning Sound’s cover of Sam and Dave’s “You Got me Hummin'" is the Nitroglycerin in my engine this week:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXotMusTin4&w=560&h=315]
• The Yager Museum had a reception for its newest exhibit “Silent Lakes and Flashing Rivers: 20th Century Fishing Cultures in Temagami." This exhibit was conceived, curated, and installed by students in Hartwick’s Museum Studies course and focuses on the impact of fishing tourism on the Temagami region of Ontario, particularly on Indigenous communities there. The exhibit looks amazing and I’m really proud of the work the students did.