Memories, Territories, and Movements: NAISA 2026 in Wallmapu

This July I traveled to Wallmapu, the ancestral homelands of the Mapuche people, in the southern part of what is today known as Chile, to attend the seventeenth annual conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Hosted by the Universidad Católica de Temuco from July 22–24, the conference brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, community members, artists, students, and knowledge keepers from across the globe under the theme “Memories, Territories and Movements.” This meeting of NAISA also held the distinction of being the first held in South America.

From the beginning, our Mapuche hosts made clear that gathering in Wallmapu carried responsibilities that stretched beyond the conventional boundaries of an academic conference. The conference opened outdoors with a ceremony attended by elders and young people alike, where prayer, song, dance, and the sounds of kultrún drums, trutruka horns, and percussion bells filled the air as many native birds flew overhead. We were invited to participate not as spectators watching a performance, but as visitors entering into relationship with the land and with one another. During the ceremony we shared mote - husked wheat prepared in a way that reminded me of the hominy my own community serves during our annual corn harvest - and a deliciously fermented quinoa drink.

Later that evening, conference attendees convened for several welcome addresses and traditional performances, including a performance by Mapuche ülkantufe Elisa Avendaño Curaqueo. Curaqueo offered an especially moving ülkantun or vocal expression through which histories, relationships, wisdom and responsibilities are carried. Her song honored Mapuche defenders of Wallmapu whose lives have been lost amid continuing struggles over land, environmental protection, and state power. Her performance underscored something that would remain present throughout the conference for me: memory was not being approached as only an accounting of the past, but as an embodied practice through which people sustain relationships, grieve, celebrate and imagine Indigenous futures.

The academic program was expansive, with concurrent sessions offered in English and/or Spanish on subjects ranging from Indigenous feminisms and more-than-human relationships to food sovereignty, environmental justice, archives, digital technologies and more. I prioritized several panels on Indigenous digital humanities and community-governed archival work because of the ways those topics intersected with my own conference presentation.

The panel “Digital Relationalities: Indigenous Methods in AI, Archives, Story Mapping, and Environmental Strategy” asked how Indigenous methodologies can transform technologies governed by colonial ideas about land, knowledge and ownership. Sophie Grewell (graduate student at the University of Oregon) described her digital story mapping project, Mapping Relationality, not simply as a project locating Kānaka Maoli people within conventional cartography, but as a project capable of representing interconnected relationships that move across land, water, genealogy, performance, and the spiritual world. Another presentation discussed the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation Archive Project, which is using Mukurtu to support Tribally governed description, access protocols, and digital stewardship. The project connects archival recovery to the Nation’s ecological restoration of Wuda Ogwa, the site of the 1863 Bear River Massacre. Materials surfaced through student work in the University of Utah’s archive have also supported the Nation’s contemporary assertions of sovereignty.

Other sessions brought relational scholarship into conversation with food, plants, water, and creative practice. In “Restorying Futures,” Charlotte Coté discussed salmon teachings and Indigenous food sovereignty in the Pacific Northwest, arguing that climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a cultural and relational one. The presenters did not only speak about these relationships abstractly: Coté shared smoked salmon from her territory, while Māori presenters invited participants into a collaborative art-making activity connected to weaving, water, genealogy, and intergenerational knowledge-transmission.

The panel “More-than-human Relationality as Antidote to Destruction Across Our Territories” further challenged the colonial treatment of lands, plants, and waters as resources. Ānua Reyes’s (University of Texas at San Antonio) presentation approached Pajē, or peyote, not by asking what it is, but who Pajē is. That shift in language placed the plant within relations of kinship, ceremonial responsibility, geography, and language while also exposing how federal recognition systems can interfere with much older Indigenous relationships. This presentation prompted me to think again about the praying town landscapes I study across Nipmuc territory in Massachusetts. Colonial archives often describe these places primarily as institutions created by missionaries. Indigenous-centered approaches require us also to ask who actually built, inhabited, maintained, and transformed them—and how Native people exercised agency even within structures intended to regulate their movements, kinship connections and relationships to land.

For my part, I chaired and participated in the roundtable “Building Indigenous Digital Humanities.” Allyson LaForge, Brad Lopes (joining us from Aquinnah on Noepe/Martha’s Vineyard) and I discussed Re-Mapping Patuxet: Wampanoag Place, Memory, and the Colonial Archive, an in-progress collaborative StoryMap project drawing upon collections at the John Carter Brown and John Hay libraries. Our project recontextualizes Samuel de Champlain’s 1605 representation of Wampanoag homelands by foregrounding Wampanoag place-making, knowledge-keeping, continuity, and relationships to land and water. Alongside presentations on Ojibwe and Dakota digital projects, our conversation considered what it means to build digital resources through community-engaged methodologies that prioritize Indigenous accessibility, authority, and data sovereignty rather than treating collaboration as a final stage added to an already-designed project.

Attending the conference encouraged me to continue to think differently about the JCB’s extensive collections concerning Spanish colonization in South America and its Indigenous-language holdings, which range geographically from the Arctic to Patagonia. Among them is Andrés Febrés’s Arte de la lengua general del Reyno de Chile (1765), an early printed Mapuzugun and Spanish grammar and vocabulary. The collection also includes Alonso de Ovalle’s richly illustrated Histórica relación del reyno de Chile (1646) and its Tabula geographica regni Chile, and other engravings that claimed to represent Indigenous people and practices in Chile.

These works are not transparent records of Mapuche life. They emerged from missionary, imperial, commercial, and cartographic projects that sought to translate Indigenous lands and knowledge into ideas and formats legible to European audiences. Placed in conversation with the living languages, songs, scholarship, political movements, and relationships we encountered in Wallmapu, however, they can help us examine the inner-workings of the colonial archive and everything those archives failed to contain.

NAISA 2026 offered more than an opportunity to present research or learn about new projects. It demonstrated what scholarship can become when memory remains connected to territory, and when intellectual exchange is grounded in relationships among people, lands, waters, plants, ancestors, and future generations.

Text by Kimberly Toney, Coordinating Curator for Native American and Indigenous Materials