UC Berkeley News: Behind the scenes of Native Seas with Sophia Perez
UC Berkeley News features BCNM student Sophia Perez (PhD Candidate, Geography) and the story of how she came to organize Native Seas, our weeklong series of events on the revitalization of Pacific Indigenous seafaring.
Excerpt:
“Instead of seeing Indigeneity as connected to the absence of technology, which is often how it’s framed by the Western world,” Sophia says, “I’m interested in how we as Pacific Islanders approach technology — ancient and modern — to serve our own purposes within our own value systems.”
The workshop, titled “Native Seas: Traditional Micronesian Navigators Visit the Bay Area,” runs from March 9-12. The navigators — Sesario Sewralur, Mario Benito, Cecilio Raiukiulipiy and Milton “Jun” Coleman Jr. — arrived on March 7, when they attended an opening ceremony and welcome reception at the UC Gill Tract Community Farm. The event was hosted by the Pacific Islander farming organization Planting Oceania and Lisjan (Ohlone) leaders of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, to honor the visiting seafarers within the local Indigenous community.
The public programming begins Monday, March 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium, where the navigators will lead an immersive session using the planetarium dome to demonstrate traditional seafaring methods and Indigenous scientific knowledge systems. Following a keynote lecture on Wednesday at 5 p.m. at Berkeley’s Jarvis Auditorium, the series concludes on Thursday at 1 p.m. with a hands-on demonstration of traditional canoe technology at the Berkeley Boathouse. All events are open to the public; registration is required.
Read the full article here.
(Image from left: Corrina Gould, chair and spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan (Ohlone) and co-founder of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, stands with visiting master navigators — Milton “Jun” Coleman, Mario Benito and Cecilio Raiukiulipiy — and Sophia Perez, a Berkeley Ph.D. geography student and the Indigenous Technologies Coordinator at the Berkeley Center for New Media. On Saturday, they attended an opening ceremony and welcome reception at the UC Gill Tract Community Farm. Not pictured: Grandmaster navigator Sesario Sewralur. Image by Aliña Gumataotao)