10/20/2022
By Alicia Weaver

The Rev. Dana McLean Greeley Fellowship for Peace Studies at UMass Lowell is excited to announce the second event of its 2022-2023 Speaker series: Indigenous People’s Struggles, Resistance and Survival Around the World. This series focuses on settler colonial and structural violence against Indigenous peoples as well as resistance mobilized by Indigenous communities locally and transnationally. The speaker series will culminate in the campus visit (April 2023) of the 2023 Greeley Scholar for Peace Studies, Dayamani Barla, an Adivasi (Indigenous) activist, journalist, writer and storyteller from Jharkhand, Central India.

Reclaiming Poetry, Folklore, and Fabric: Toward Everyday Indigenous Resistance (VIRTUAL EVENT)
A conversation with Dr. Theyiesinuo Keditsu
(Free and open to the public)

Time: Tuesday, Nov. 1, 10 to 11 a.m.
Registration: This is a virtual event. Please register at uml.edu/keditsu to receive a Zoom link.

Please join Assoc. Prof. Urmitapa Dutta for a conversation with Theyiesinuo Keditsu, an Indigenous feminist, poet, academic, folklorist, writer and educator from Nagaland in Northeast India. In the conversation, Keditsu will discuss the ways in which she is working toward reclaiming Indigenous forms of being, knowing, and relating. Specifically, she will share how she does this by creating spaces for the revival of Indigenous fabric and folklore,
as well as through feminist poetry.

Theyiesinuo Keditsu is a feminist poet, academic, writer and educator. She advocates the revival of Indigenous Naga textiles and women’s narratives through her popular Instagram avatar @mekhalamama. She has published two books of poetry, Sopfünuo and Wake and contributed to a number of anthologies & journals in her creative & academic capacities. Her poem, “Whore” was translated into Gujarati by Sitanshu Yashaschandra. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research focuses on contemporary Naga culture, indigenous knowledge, indigenous feminisms, oral & written literatures of Nagaland.  She is widely sought after as a public speaker & is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at Kohima College, India.