CCNN Newsletter Archive
Visit this page for recent CCNN Newsletters, which announce upcoming events, spotlight members of our community, and dig into important stories impacting Native communities.
California Center for Native Nations Newsletter
Summer 2025
Announcements
WELCOME DR. KĒHAULANI VAUGHN
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Kēhaulani Vaughn has joined Dr. Mark Minch-de Leon as a co-director of the California Center for Native Nations! Though Kēhaulani has been deeply involved in the CCNN community since returning to UC Riverside last summer, she officially started as CCNN’s co-director on July 1st, 2025. Kēhaulani is a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi scholar whose research engages Pacific Islander and Indigenous feminist theorizations of land, environment, and regeneration. After receiving her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UCR in 2017, and completing a postdoc with the University of Minnesota in the department of American Indian Studies, she became an assistant professor in the department of Education, Culture & Society at the University of Utah where she established the Research Center for Pasifika and Indigenous Knowledges as co-principal investigator for grants awarded by the Mellon Foundation. We are so excited to see CCNN continue to bloom under Kēhaulani and Mark’s collective leadership!
CONGRATULATIONS LORI ON YOUR RECENT RETIREMENT!
CCNN celebrates Lorene Sisquoc's recent retirement from her position as curator of the Sherman Indian Museum. In 1985, Lorene began volunteer training under the guidance of co-founder and curator of the museum, Ramona K. Bradley. Lorene became the curator and manager in 1991. Over the decades, Lorene has taught basket-making, Native plant uses, and material culture to Sherman Indian High School students and throughout Southern California. She is a descendant of the Mountain Cahuilla and a member of the Fort Sill Apache tribe. Lorene also co-founded Mother Earth Clan Culture Programs and Nex'wetem, the Southern California Indian Basket Weavers Organization. In 1997, the city of Riverside honored Lorene with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visionary Award for community cultural awareness. She also received the Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Heritage Keepers Award. In 2023, Lorene served as the first Community Scholar in Residence at UC Riverside, where she taught our campus community tribal traditional values and awareness of local tribal communities, guest lectured in classes, and led hands-on workshops on basketry. She has been serving as the Elder/Scholar in Residence at Cal Poly Pomona since 2015. We are excited for Lorene as she embarks on the next chapter of her illustrious career. Stay tuned for a more in depth highlight of Lorene’s work in our next issue. Read more about Lori’s work on Inside UCR’s blog.
UPCOMING CLASSES IN NATIVE STUDIES
For a living list of classes offered in Native studies, check out this link! Have a class you’d like to be listed? Email CCNN@ucr.edu and cc Daireeann Mancinas (dmanc006@ucr.edu).
CCNN WEBSITE UPDATE
We have been hard at work updating our website to showcase our faculty fellows, our past and upcoming events, and the awesome people who work with CCNN. Check out the changes and stay tuned for more to come.
CCNN Events
TTPC SERIES
CCNN is excited to announce that we are partnering with the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy (TTPC) on a series of webinars on issues such as Traditional Ecological Knowledge, land stewardship, and Indigenous kinship and relationality. The first in the series, Rebirth Through Fire: Lessons from the Eaton Fire and Embracing TEK, a Native American Philosophy, was held on July 24, 2025. The webinar was a conversation between Tongva leaders and Eaton Canyon representatives on traditional relations to fire, the colonial conditions for extreme fire events, and building anticolonial Indigenous kinship relationships. We look forward to future events with TTPC.
MORE COMING UP
On October 23, CCNN will be hosting a lunchtime talk by Lina Tejeda about her role co-curating the exhibit, Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art. Please be on the lookout for more information along with the official announcement.
In September 2025, the Sundance Film Festival Indigenous Film Tour will be stopping at Riverside! The 2025 Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Tour is a 98-minute theatrical program featuring 7 short films from Indigenous filmmakers: six from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and one from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Learn more and get your tickets.
Art Valles with CCNN put together a document for getting the word out about local events in the community. You can see those events here. If you have events you’d like us to add to this document, send us an email at CCNN@ucr.edu.
2024-2025 Event Recap
The California Center for Native Nations had an event-packed year, during which we organized and co-sponsored book talks, multi-day conferences, film screenings, hands-on workshops, roundtables, celebrations, and performances.
In the Fall quarter, CCNN kicked things off with a co-sponsored book talk by Bayley Marquez on her new book, Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space. In the following months, we co-sponsored two multi-day events: Encuentro de Músicas de Oaxaca: Raíces y Ramas (Roots and Branches), which brought together Indigenous Oaxacan musicians and scholars for a two-day event organized by CCNN member Xóchitl Chávez, and Al-Hadenah: Intellectual Sanctuary Collective Conference, a conference gathering Palestinian scholars, organized by Palestinian feminist scholar, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and emeritus UCR Professor, David Lloyd. In November, CCNN member Freya Schiwy organized a film screening by Native filmmaker Loren Waters, and hosted a conversation between Waters and Laurel C. Smith.
In the Winter quarter, we kicked off a three-part series organized by newly elected CCNN co-director Kēhaulani Vaughn featuring Pacific Islander and Native American trans-Indigenous conversations. The inaugural event featured a conversation between Asena Filihia and Josh Little on trans-Indigenous education and Native American and oceanic epistemologies, followed by a conversation between Nanea Lum and Mercedes Dorame on trans-Indigenous and trans-Pacific aesthetics and art practice, moderated by UCR alum and assistant professor Nicole Furtado. In May, the series came to an end (for now!), with a conversation between Indigenous Race and Ethnic Studies scholar Dr. Lana Lopesi and multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator Sarah Dilley. We look forward to resuming this series in the coming academic year.
The Spring quarter was the busiest of the year, featuring two book talks: one by Katie Keliaa on her recently published book, Refusing Settler Domesticity: Native Women's Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program, and the other with Teresa Velásquez on her book Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador, organized by Jennifer Najera in the Ethnic Studies department. In the spirit of collaborative art-making and aesthetic performance, CCNN co-sponsored three interactive workshops: dance making & kakyosin, a performance lecture & workshop by E. Macias; a series of workshops with Māori dance artist Tiaki Kerei; and a workshop on Kāpala (traditional Hawaiian printing) with Nanea Lum. With the department of Media & Cultural Studies, we hosted a screening, keynote, and roundtable discussion of Abby Martin & Mike Prysner’s film, Earth’s Greatest Enemy in May.
We closed out the school year with two back-to-back events, beginning with a graduate student-organized conversation on Native publishing with Erin Marie Lynch, Amanda Castro, and Mark Minch-de Leon and ending with a rain-soaked celebration honoring the one year anniversary of the opening of UCR’s Native American Garden!
It was an honor to host so many brilliant artists, performers, activists, and scholars this year, and to collaborate with departments and research centers across UCR. Thank you to all community members who attended our events—it is your collective engagement and energy that makes these events generative and exciting. Follow us on Instagram and visit our website for more events to come in the Fall!
2024-25 Faculty Fellows
CCNN was thrilled to host four faculty fellows during the 2024-2025 academic year: Timothy Petete, Liz Przybylski, Michelle Raheja, and Kēhaulani Vaughn. To learn more about their exciting projects, head to our website.
Spotlight
Advancing Native Health Research at UCR
We recently had the opportunity to interview Jordyn Ramirez, an upcoming fourth year Native undergraduate here at UC Riverside whose work bridges cultural advocacy and medical research.
Jordyn is currently conducting research with the School of Medicine, focusing on Native health- a field that hits home. Through her work, she hopes to contribute to culturally informed solutions which address longstanding inequities. Research isn’t just about academics to Jordyn, it’s personal. In this interview you will hear her emphasize the importance of community centered approaches and the need for greater Native representation in medical studies as Native health is more than data, it’s about our stories, people, and resilience. Jordyn’s research plays a vital role in ensuring our communities are acknowledged and heard.
As she prepares for her final year at UCR, Jordyn remains steadfast in uplifting Native perspectives in medicine, intertwining scientific rigor along with cultural stewardship. Here at CCNN we look forward to seeing Jordyn’s contributions unfold and the positive effects her research will create.
Watch the full interview on our Youtube channel!
Digging In: Underground Scholars at UCR
by Art Valles
Art Valles (Chihene Nde) graduated this past spring from UC Riverside with his BA in Ethnic Studies and a minor in Native American studies. He was recently accepted to complete a Master’s in Public Policy & Administration at the University of Redlands, and plans to start the program this fall. Art was President of both Underground Scholars and the Native American Student Association (NASA). Art was incarcerated, and has dedicated his education and organizing to improving the lives of other formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students and the Native American communities who have been so devastated by western carceral-colonial systems. This devastation has taken the form of Spanish missions, anti-Indian loitering laws, indentured servitude/slavery, removal, reservations and rancherias (initially managed by the US Department of War), borders, the criminalization of Native life through racialized laws and policing, and of course mass incarceration in public and private prisons. In this moment, when the carceral state is ramping up its violence, detentions, and exclusions in an explicitly white supremacist demographic project, and referencing quandaries about Native American US citizenship to justify its actions, it is important to listen to stories such as Art’s. We celebrate Art’s accomplishments and his ongoing work.
Art Valles (left) at Native Grad Dinner with Shannon Rivers in June 2025.
Growing up Native, prison was normalized. My grandparents came to the city to find a better life, to find work. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother and at church as my mom tried her best to raise me as a single mom. Again and again, I was told I was a bad kid in school, a message that stuck with me. In reality, it was a learning disability that made school difficult for me.
In the city many other things can pull us in. Many of my family members, faced with the pressure to assimilate to a local culture , ended up in the gangs in LA and took part in activities that landed them in prison. Even though I stayed away from the gangs I still found myself getting into trouble. I didn't fit in and felt different from everyone around me. Eventually, I made a mistake and found myself facing a life sentence.
People do not realize how easy it is to make a small mistake; it only takes twenty seconds and you could spend a lifetime paying for it. It can happen to anyone. And while anyone can make a mistake that lands you in prison, some communities are often targeted more. I ended up going to prison for a little over eight years. I didn’t want to risk a life sentence, so I pleaded out and was sentenced to thirteen years. While I was in prison, I took as many classes as possible to get time off, which was one of my motivations. By the time I was released, I had four AA degrees: in anthropology, psychology, arts and humanities, and social behaviors. The college that I went to made sure that they set us up for success and that our classes would transfer when we got out of prison. The school also informed me about programs such as Underground Scholars that help formerly incarcerated people at universities.
Art and his mother while he was in prison.
Returning home, I had all kinds of plans, but most didn't work out. I wanted to go to UCLA but ended up at Riverside. When I arrived, I reached out to the Underground Scholars campus office, an office that offers support for formerly incarcerated students in higher-ed, and they helped me set up my housing on campus, enroll in classes, and gave me a scholarship. Soon after, I learned that Underground Scholars had two different components: the campus office and the entirely student-run student organization. I started attending the Underground Scholars student meetings after a student in one of my classes invited me, and while the campus office helped me access certain resources, the student org is where I found a community of other formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students. The community is larger than you might think. Maybe we don't talk about it or we don't think about it, but it still impacts people’s lives.
The goal of the Underground Scholars student org is to help formerly incarcerated people succeed in higher ed, while, at the same time, working to tear down that school-to-prison pipeline. We want to lower recidivism rates through higher education, and build communities of support. Though I was on my road to success, I faced a lot of challenges after coming out of prison. I was working a full time job and attending school full time. I struggled with imposter syndrome. I was diagnosed with PTSD and depression. I was socially awkward. I was institutionalized. I didn't know how to talk to other people. I would shut down. The learning disability that got me called a “bad kid” when I was younger still affected me.
UCR Underground Scholars Francine Phillips (left) and Alikoi Parra table for the Undergrad Scholars student organization.
As a formerly incarcerated individual, I understand firsthand the challenges formerly incarcerated individuals face when returning home, no matter how hard we have worked to transform our lives. And I am not alone. Many formerly incarcerated people face discrimination and stigma in spaces of higher ed. Criminal records make it difficult to secure housing, find employment opportunities,and some people, dependent on their crime, may find it difficult to secure financial aid or scholarships. Despite my credentials and readiness for employment, I encountered barriers such as company policies that claim to support second chances but, in practice, created those barriers that kept formerly incarcerated individuals like me out of the workforce. Even though I took classes to get my Associate’s degree in prison, I hadn’t been around technology for a long time and I struggled to catch up once I was out. Formerly incarcerated people also often have to navigate parole and probation requirements that get in the way of class schedules.
I still have a hard time writing. I get bad writer's block. I don't know how to ask for help. But through programs like Underground Scholars, I was able to find the help and community that I needed. I was directed to go to the Student Disability Center where I was finally able to receive accommodations. I became President of the Underground Scholars student org for the 2024-2025 academic school year, I led the board, and held weekly Org meetings to check in with individuals who are incarcerated or impacted. I worked to recruit other students who have been incarcerated or impacted. I have tabled on campus and at events. I’ve lobbied legislators with local nonprofits to bring awareness and change public policy that can help incarcerated people. I organized symposiums and spoke on panels on behalf of formerly incarcerated students in higher education. I spoke on my own experiences to inform people that as a Native I can succeed after the mistakes I made in my life. Showing that my life has been improved through higher education, I hope to open a pathway for those who come after me that do not know that this program exists.
Art (second from left) speaking on a panel at the Western History Association's annual conference. He was joined by ....
Many Native Americans are incarcerated at a high rate. It is my belief that it may be due to generational trauma, often made worse by colonization. I have had the ability to bridge the gap between formerly incarcerated students, Native American people, and our communities. I believe that if other formerly incarcerated or impacted Natives were to know about the program they would take advantage of it and use it to change their lives. We can take what we learn and direct it in a way that benefits our tribal people. Although there are those of us that have self-doubt, who maybe believe that we are not good enough to succeed in society off the rez, who have felt we don’t fit in with schools because of a family history with boarding schools, it's never too late to get educated and do something grander for our communities.
Art at UCR graduation in June 2025.
Now that he has graduated, Art plans to create a non profit organization that donates traditional medicines to incarcerated Native people and advocates for them to be able to pray in traditional ways. He wants to help provide reentry services and resources to formerly incarcerated Natives, and help communities recover from intergenerational trauma, mental health challenges, and drug/alcohol addiction. If you are interested in donating or getting involved, please reach out to Art via email: wecomeinagoodway@gmail.com or instagram.
For anyone interested in finding out more about Underground Scholars, please follow these links: