Authority on Indigenous rights and genomics to deliver MSU Stegner Lecture on April 7

BOZEMAN – Kim TallBear, a professor at the University of Alberta specializing in Indigenous rights and genomics and a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe, will deliver the 2022 Stegner Lecture at Montana State University on Thursday, April 7. Her lecture, “The Vanishing Indian Speaks Back: Race, Genomics and Indigenous Rights,” will held at 7 p.m. in the Hager Auditorium of the Museum of the Rockies.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and a reception will follow the event. Admission is free, but tickets are necessary and can be found at eventbrite.com/e/294901958697.

TallBear is a professor of Native studies and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Society at the University of Alberta. She is an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, descended from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. TallBear was raised on the Flandreau Santee Sioux Reservation in South Dakota as well as in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is author of “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” and other publications on the roles of science and technology in the colonization of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous involvement in science and technology. She is a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Lakota and Nakota writers.

TallBear has a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in community planning from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. TallBear worked for 10 years as an environmental planner for federal agencies, tribal governments and national tribal organizations. Her later work for an Indigenous environmental research organization led her to complete her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the history of consciousness.

TallBear’s lecture is sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Chair in Western American Studies in the Department of History and Philosophy and the Department of Native American Studies, all in the College of Letters and Science.