Call for proposals

MALCS 2026 Summer Institute
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities July 15-18, 2026

Bdote, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, is a sacred place for Dakota and Ojibwe people. It is also the place where Dred Scott, an enslaved man in Missouri, began his quest for freedom. Signifying confluence and creation in Dakota and Ojibwe creation stories, Bdote offers a powerful analytic for understanding the interconnected histories, geographies and social movements of Indigenous, Latina/x, Afro-Latina/x and Afro-Indigenous communities in and beyond Minnesota. When bodies of water merge, the earth’s soil is churned and it temporarily joins in the flow. As Tiffany Lethabo King theorizes about Black shoals, this churning and merging refuses stasis and conformity to settler colonial boundaries, or borders, as we can see through the disobedient flows of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande to the St. Lawrence and Amazon Rivers that cut across multiple nation-states, which also reflect the migration journeys of people, birds, insects, fish and other animals. Water’s ability to continuously reform the land is a useful metaphor for reconsidering and problematizing borderlands, but also the agency of water and its ability to transform the landscape, offering new insights into how we may ethically inhabit this earth.

In Mni Sota, Bdote is significant historically because it witnessed the incarceration and forced removal of Dakota people happening. At this seized location, it was renamed “Fort Snelling” during the Dakota War of 1862. Indigenous-led activism has called upon truth-telling not only of the settler colonial violence and erasures that happened in situ, but of the spiritual meaning that Indigenous people tied to the place. In Mni Sota, it has been the Winyan Oyate and Ogichidaa Ikwe who have been at the forefront of restoring places to their original meaning and original names, including the protection of waterways from further settler colonial extraction and contamination. Today, we are witnessing the rebellion of Indigenous, mestiza, Afro-Indigenous, and Afro-Latina women, femmes, and queers to protect our more-than-human relatives in the sacred fight for all life, even as our resistance becomes increasingly criminalized in the Americas and on a global scale.. This struggle is embedded in the land and waterways that traverse and transcend this place. 

Through the 2026 Summer Institute, MALCS welcomes proposals that create a space where we can learn collectively from Bdote, the movement of water and earth, our Indigenous and more-than-human relatives, and each other, to uplift struggles for freedom and planetary life. We seek to resist settler colonial borders and structures that inflict harm, including the harm of being torn from land, or destierro, as theorized by Yomaira Figueroa. We also listen to Indigenous Wayuu scholar Jose Quintero Weir’s call for hacertopías. Unlike utopia (the “no” place), hacertopía is an agentic collective and cultural place-making in relational buen (con)vivir with other saberes. Hacertopías reconfigure power as a communal force with affective investments to place in order to create and cultivate, instead of control and dominance. 

We call for proposals that explore Movements along Bdote: Disruption and Solidarity Sin Fronteras through multiple critical race, gender and/or queer lenses and methodological approaches, such as testimonio, that may speak to: