Activities

Fall 2022 Event

Art Gallery Exhibit - Each One Inspired: Haudenosaunee Art across the Homelands from the New York State Museum

The Native American Studies program supports a number of activities associated with issues and events in the North Country and our region—from bead-making workshops on campus to land rights conferences hosted at the Onondaga Nation.  For specific information regarding these activities, please click on the links below.

 1) The attached photograph, taken by Salli Benedict of the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne when she came to talk to this class in February this year, is of the students in FRPG 188V 'Social and Environmental Issues facing First Nations peoples today' which is not only a First Year Seminar but also a Community Based Learning course in which the students spend two hours each week at a host site on the Mohawk reservation at Akwesasne. This semester we have had four students at the Akwesasne Boys and Girls Club (where this photograph was taken), four at the St. Regis Mohawk School, four at the Akwesasne Freedom School, two at the Tribal Museum, and one at the Environment Division of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. In the photo also is the instructor for the course, Professor emerita Celia Nyamweru.

 2) Beadwork instruction: beginning in the fall semester 2009, several SLU students, faculty and staff have been learning beading techniques and relevant aspects of Mohawk culture from Ceezee Mitchell, a healer, herbalist and cultural expert from Akwesasne. Last semester we made small beadwork panels with the design of the Five Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk) which we sewed onto small leather pouches that contained a piece of sweet flag root, which has powerful medicinal properties. This semester (spring 2010) we are making earrings.

The Native North American Traveling College Social Dance