Department Events

The University of Oregon's Environmental and Natural Resources Law (ENR) Center and cross-campus partners will present the 20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture, featuring Bryan Newland (Ojibwe), former US Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs—via Zoom Webinar. Register for the webinar through Zoom or on our event page. 

Newland will present his virtual talk, "The Vanishing Indian Property Rights: How Federal Courts are Stripping Indians of the Rights to Their Own Lands." 

Bryan Newland is a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, where he served as Tribal President from 2017 to 2021 and Chief Judge from 2013 to 2017. From 2021 to 2025, he served as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the US Department of the Interior, where he led the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, and Bureau of Trust Funds Administration. As Assistant Secretary, Newland helped coordinate a historic $45B investment in Indian Country; led the development of a co-stewardship policy to promote public-land management agreements between federal agencies and Tribal Nations; and worked to implement the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies and to address these policies' intergenerational impact. Today, Newland is a principal attorney at Powers, Pyles, Sutter & Verville, PC, where he represents Tribal governments, Tribal business entities, and inter-Tribal organizations on a broad range of legal and policy matters. Newland received a JD from Michigan State University (MSU) College of Law, where he also earned an Indian Law Certificate, and a BA from James Madison College at MSU. He is a recipient of the National American Indian Court Judges Association's Judicial Excellence Award (2024) and the Clean Water Action Great Lakes Protectors Award (2020). 

Through its Native Environmental Sovereignty Project, the ENR Center established the Rennard Strickland Lecture series in 2006 to honor the legacy of former Oregon Law Professor and Dean Rennard Strickland, who retired that year and passed in 2021. An Osage citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Strickland contributed mightily to the field of Indian Law, the practice of legal education, and Oregon Law's ENR and Indian Law programs throughout his lifetime. In keeping with his assertion that "[i]f there is to be a post-Columbian future—a future for any of us—it will be an Indian future..." (Tonto's Revenge, 1997), the Rennard Strickland Lecture series has a thematic focus on Indigenous environmental-legal leadership and Tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century. 

The 20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture is co-sponsored by the UO Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Oregon Law's Native American Law Students Association, and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. 

Oregon CLE credit pending. 

History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies invites our graduate students, faculty, and staff to a welcome back barbecue!

Spend an evening with History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Talk with old friends, meet new colleagues, and enjoy fine food and drinks.

All HIST and IRES graduate students, faculty, and staff are invited. Families warmly welcomed.

The Latinx Studies Program invites you to our fall reception with friends and colleagues. Join us for paletas and aguas frescas from Peek-A-Boo Delight!

Enjoy an afternoon of great conversation, community, and delicious frozen treats as we kick off the new academic year!

Free and open to all Latinx studies minors and students interested in the minor.

The Oregon Humanities Center presents its 2026-27 endowed lectureship series centered on the theme of “Reading.”  

Modern life in America presents constant contradictions, asking individuals to navigate delicate balances of power and injustice, pain and pleasure, and expectations and actualization. An acclaimed poet and memoirist, Saeed Jones focuses on questions of the self, desire, fear, and vulnerability through a Black queer perspective.

In his talk “Creative Nonfiction and the Art of Reality,” Jones will use the lens of his experience as a writer and reader to explore his—and the genre’s—relationship to reality, morality, and systems of power. How does a nonfiction writer incorporate the raw material of life into work in a way that is not just factual, but artful, ethical, and compelling, and moves readers toward truth in a larger sense? How can we understand these works as functioning within systems of power, and how might this impact the way writers shape their material, and the way readers receive it?

Jones’s talk, the first in the OHC’s 2026- 27 “Reading” lecture series, will include a book sale by J. Michaels Books and a book signing. This talk is free and open to the public, and will be livestreamed. Please register at ohc.uoregon.edu.

Jones’s books of poetry include Prelude to Bruise (2015; winter of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry) and Alive at the End of the World (2023; AnisfieldWolf Book Award for Poetry). With stylistic nods to mythology and Black iconography, his poetry heightens surreal aspects of daily realities and asks readers to witness tragedy, triumph, and realization alongside the writer’s own revelations.

How We Fight For Our Lives, Jones’s first memoir, won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and documents his journey of self-discovery as a young, Black, gay man from the South. As in his other works, Jones meditates on the self: from understanding his own identity to observing its various collisions and cohesions with the outside world. As Jones struggles to uncover his own identities, he never abandons his engrossing poetic tone. Following How We Fight For Our Lives, Jones is currently working on a forthcoming memoir entitled Home Out There. Jones was the 2024-2025 artist-in-residence at the Media, Health, and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School, lecturing on global health and social medicine. He also cohosts Vibe Check, a podcast focused on making sense of what’s going on in news and culture—and how it all feels.

IRES is back, and we’re kicking things off with our welcome event!

Join your faculty and students from the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at our welcome event to kick off the academic year! Meet new people, reconnect with community, and learn what’s happening in IRES.

Light refreshments will be served.

Free and open to all IRES majors and minors.

Join us for a spooky season-themed open house, trick-or-treat style! Meet the faculty, ask questions, learn about winter term classes, and grab candy as you go.

Free and open to all IRES students.