2026 Online Symposium: May 3, 2026

“We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies in California”

Panel: “Revitalizing Sacred Ceremony”

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy is an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt who researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, Environmental Justice, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and decolonization. She is the Co-Director of the NAS Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute where she leads several research projects focused on the resurgence of Indigenous Science and place-based learning. In 2025 Dr. Risling Baldy along with Co-Director Dr. Kaitlin Reed were awarded the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for their work with the lab.

Dr. Risling Baldy is the Principal Investigator for the “Food for Indigenous Futures Project” which looks at connections between food justice, food sovereignty, mental health, and substance abuse prevention for Native American Youth. ​She has also helped organize several community facing events like the Northern California #LandBack Symposium, the Water Advocacy & Water Protectors Certificate Program, the Humboldt Indigenous Foods Festival, and the California Indian Conference. Dr. Risling Baldy is also the Program Coordinator for the Masters of Social Science in Environment & Community.

Her book: We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies received “Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies” at the 2019 Native American Indigenous Studies Association Conference. The book uses a framework of Native Feminisms to locate revitalization within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities. The book is available with the University of Washington Press. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies at UC Davis; her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Diego State University; and her B.A. in Psychology with a Specialization in Health and Development from Stanford University. ​

In 2007, Dr. Risling Baldy co-founded the Native Women’s Collective, a nonprofit organization that supports the continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture. She is Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe.

Abstract: This presentation focuses on the revitalization of the Hupa Flower Dance ceremony and documents how women in the Hoopa Valley Tribe worked collectively to restore a traditional women’s coming-of-age ceremony that had been disrupted by colonization. Drawing from oral histories, archival materials, community collaboration, and personal experience the book explores how cultural revitalization operates as both an intellectual intervention and a lived political act.  “Native feminisms” are frameworks grounded in Indigenous epistemologies rather than Western feminist paradigms that also challenge colonial narratives that have framed Indigenous ceremonies, in particular those related to menstruation and girlhood. Instead, this shows how the Flower Dance affirms gender balance, community responsibility, and the sacredness of young women’s transitions into adulthood. By centering Indigenous women’s voices this reframes coming-of-age ceremonies as sites of empowerment, survivance, and sovereignty. Reclaiming ceremony is not merely symbolic; it actively restructures community relationships, restores cultural knowledge, and resists ongoing settler colonialism. Blending memoir, ethnography, and theory, We Are Dancing for You ultimately positions Indigenous women’s ceremonial practices as vital to decolonial futures.

See Cutcha’s work in the video Honoring Women: Reclaiming Coming of Age Ceremony

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“Western Science is ‘half-brained.’ Indigenous Elders had it right: Rethinking Animal-Human relationships and research“

Panel: “Dethroning Human Hubris”

2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026

Reimagining Goddess Scholarship:  At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge

 

Arieahn Matamonasa Bennett, PhD, joined ASWM after completing her Ph.D. in 2005, mentored by the late Patricia Monaghan, and has been a frequent contributor and speaker and a member of the ASWM Advisory Board. She completed her MA and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Fielding Graduate University and is a licensed psychologist. She is an Associate Professor with the School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS), at DePaul University where she has taught for the past two decades. She has widely published and taught in multidisciplinary research areas: Cross-cultural, ethnic minority & indigenous psychology, women’s psychology and the history, science and psychology of human-animal relationships. In addition to teaching, she maintains a small private practice which incorporates Equine Assisted Psychotherapy and experiential learning in nature as a part of holistic therapeutic practice.

Presentation Description:  We have deep and powerful experiences with horses and nature that are difficult to describe and quantify with our rational, scientific minds. Understanding and integration happens in the metaphoric mind of dreams, symbols, storytelling, myth, dance, art, and music. Based on theories ranging from Jungian (Depth) psychology to the pioneering work of Samples (1976, 1993) and (ancient) indigenous scientific paradigms (Cajate, 2000; Couture, 2013; Wilson, 2008), animal-human studies are given what is often a missing or invisible lens. The metaphoric mind, or ‘nature mind’ is our oldest mind and has been developing for about three million years. Western society and its educational systems focus on mainly left-brain functions such as linear thinking and language. Metaphoric, symbolic perception and intuitive, right-brain activity has been neglected. As language and the rational mind develops, the holistic experience of the metaphoric mind eventually recedes into the subconscious, but it can, however, still be called on or accessed during creative or spiritual experiences. Metaphoric mind processes are tied to creativity, perception, images, physical senses, and intuition. “This presentation explores the ways in which accessing and giving equal regard to the metaphoric mind holds important keys to a more whole-brained scientific paradigm, shaping, deepening, and advancing our understanding the animal-human bond and our connections to the natural world.

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