Panel: How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America

Celebrate the release of How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America, the latest addition to the Voice of Witness book series, with a roundtable conversation about Indigenous narratives, visibility, and storytelling. 

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How We Go Home, edited by oral historian Sara Sinclair, shares contemporary first-person Indigenous stories in the long and ongoing fight to protect Native land, rights, and life. In myriad ways, each narrator’s life has been shaped by loss, injustice, resilience, and the struggle to share space with settler nations. In this roundtable conversation, narrator Ashley Hemmers will be joined by the book’s editor, Sara Sinclair, and News from Native California editor, Terria Smith, to discuss representation and visibility of Indigenous communities today. 

This event is cosponsored by Voice of Witness (VOW), a San Francisco-based nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by—and fighting against—injustice. The VOW Book Series depicts human rights issues through the edited oral histories of people—VOW narrators—who are most deeply impacted and at the heart of solutions to address injustice. The series explores issues of race-, gender-, and class-based inequity through the lenses of the criminal justice system, migration, and displacement. The VOW Education Program connects over 20,000 educators, students, and advocates each year with these stories and issues through oral history-based curricula, trainings, and holistic educational support.

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How We Go Home can be purchased online through Haymarket Books. 

Speakers:

Ashley Hemmers is an enrolled member of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, whose reservation spans the states of California, Arizona, and Nevada. After leaving the reservation for an undergraduate degree on the east coast, Ashley returned and now works as a Tribal Administrator. She is a strategic specialist in multi-state cross-jurisdictional Development and Management of Tribal economies and holds over 10 years of experience in Tribal enterprising..  During her time within Tribal Government, she has worked to strengthen Tribal/Federal and Tribal/State partnerships by developing strategic models of performance for service areas within the Tribal organizational structure. Ashley graduated with her B.A. from Yale University and a Graduate Certificate in Non-Profit Management & Masters of Public Administration from the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Sara Sinclair is an oral historian, writer, and educator of Cree-Ojibwe and settler descent. Sara teaches in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University. She has contributed to the Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, Obama Presidency Oral History, and Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. She has conducted oral histories for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and the International Labor Organization, among others. 

Terria Smith is the editor of News From Native California, a quarterly magazine “devoted to the vibrant cultures, art, languages, histories, social justice movements, and stories of California’s diverse Indian peoples.” She is also the director of California Indian Publishing at Heyday. She is also a member of the Native American Journalists Association and an alumna of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.