Dinner on Us (DOU)

Real Talk: Healthy Relationships 101

Description: Dating, friendships, roomies, and everything in between—navigating relationships in college can be complicated. Join us for an open, interactive session where we break down what healthy connections look like. We’ll discuss spotting green flags, setting boundaries, and keeping your self-worth front and center. Come as you are, leave with practical tools for every relationship in your life.

Presenter: Nora Peterson (Women's Resources Center)

Impact and Opportunity: Serving Your Community from the Inside

Description: Learn about the benefits of gaining knowledge of state and/or federal systems to help develop your career goals while receiving the non-monetary benefits of state or federal employment. From benefit hours and insurance to loan forgiveness, tuition reimbursement, and leadership training programs, you will learn your field from a government perspective.

Presenter: RoxAnne LaVallie-Unabia (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians)

About the Presenter: RoxAnne LaVallie-Unabia, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians (Belcourt, North Dakota), is the CMS Statewide Manager for Native American Diversity & Inclusion for the State of Illinois. She received her Juris Doctor from UND and her B.A. from Concordia College.

RoxAnne has been involved with the Chicago Urban Native American community since 1986. She has more than 20 years of experience working in the federal government. Her wealth of experience in health equity comes from working for the Indian Health Service with Native American and Alaska Native communities across the United States.

Renewed Geographies of Belonging: Anishinaabe Natural Resource Sovereignty in Michigan

Description: This talk explores how the Tribal Natural Resources Department of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, located in Manistee, Michigan, employs relational methodologies to challenge colonial logics of resource governance. Through Dr. Myhal’s ongoing community-engaged research with the Nmé (Lake Sturgeon) restoration program and Elder’s meal program, this talk will demonstrate foundations of relationality and cultural agency as they reshape resource governance in the Great Lakes region and reaffirm Ottawa relationships to place and their more-than-human kin.

Presenter: Natasha Myhal (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians)

About the Presenter: Natasha Myhal is an enrolled citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. She is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the AIS program at Illinois, she was a Provost’s Fellow of Indigenous Environmental Studies at Ohio State.

Our Relationship with Our Food and Ourselves

Description: A presentation on acceptance, connecting to our bodies, listening to what our bodies need without judgment, and accessing resources on campus. This program is presented in connection with No Body Shaming Week on campus.

Presenters: Alex Quintanilla and Dr. Sandra D. Espinoza Montes

About the Presenters: Alex Quintanilla is a licensed clinical social worker. He is from El Salvador and immigrated to Los Angeles. He is a transfer student and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UC Berkeley. Alex focused his career on helping and working with low-resourced families in San Francisco. He now works for the Counseling Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Sandra D. Espinoza Montes (she/her) is a Clinical Counselor at the Counseling Center. She was born and raised in Wapato, Washington, a rural town that is on the land of the Yakama Nation that represents 14 tribes. Sandra earned her Doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology at Western Michigan University and works with diverse students.

Giving Thanks: Exploring Ontologies of Relationality

Description: The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) articulate a philosophy of gratitude and reciprocity through the Thanksgiving Address (Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen), often translated as “The Words That Come Before All Else.” In this Indigenous framework, Thanksgiving is not a single event but an ongoing, cyclical practice. By creating a dialogical space, this Dinner on Us program seeks to explore how gratitude, relational accountability, and respect for the diversity of life shape ways of knowing and being.

Presenters: Native American House staff and Center for Civic Education & Justice staff 

Tlingit Perspectives: Indigenous Knowledge, Culture, and Community

Description: The Center for Indigenous Science and the Native American House at Illinois, invite you to join Dr. Worl as she shares insights from decades of research and collaboration with Indigenous communities throughout Alaska and the circumpolar Arctic. Drawing upon her work on Tlingit culture and history, subsistence lifeways, and the impacts of industrial development on Native communities, Dr. Worl will explore the enduring strength of Indigenous knowledge and its vital role in sustaining Native cultures, communities, and relationships with the land.

Presenter: Rosita Kaa háni Worl

Partnering for Success: Library Support for American Indian Studies

Tuesday, February 3, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Asian American Cultural Center (1210 W. Nevada St., Urbana, IL 61801) 

Description: As the Library Subject Liaison to the American Indian Studies (AIS) program, Cindy Ingold provides research support, instructional guidance, and resource development that align with AIS curricular and community goals. This presentation will introduce students to key library services and tools (e.g., print, digital, and multimedia) that can support their academic journey and strengthen their work in AIS-related courses.

Presenter: Cindy Ingold, Library Subject Liaison to American Indian Studies, University Library

About the Presenter: Cindy Ingold is the Gender Studies, Multicultural Services, and Political Science Librarian in the Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library, one of several departmental libraries on this campus. She is the library liaison or subject specialist for the departments of American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Political Science, and the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity. Within the library, Cindy serves on many committees, including the Collections Development Committee and the DEIA Advisory Committee. Professionally, Cindy is active in national library associations related to gender studies and political science.

Co-sponsor: American Indian Studies

Sharing History with the Horse Nation

Tuesday, February 17, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Asian American Cultural Center (1210 W. Nevada St., Urbana, IL 61801)

Description: Historical narratives are often said to have been “written from the back of a horse,” yet scholarship rarely considers horses as meaningful historical actors. This presentation examines how centering Indigenous horse knowledge offers a powerful framework for understanding our shared past with greater clarity, depth, and cultural accuracy.

Presenter: Lindsay Stallones Marshall, Ph.D.

About the Presenter: Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall is an Assistant Professor of History and affiliated faculty in Native American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Oklahoma and her M.A. in Liberal Arts from Stanford University. Prior to entering higher education, she spent eleven years teaching high school history and social science in California.

Dr. Marshall’s research centers on settler colonial memory construction within U.S. history education. Her book manuscript, Teaching Us to Forget: The Wars of Westward Expansion, U.S. History Education, & Public Memory, 1870–1995, examines how narratives taught in schools have shaped public memory of the U.S. wars against Native Nations and the enduring impact of anti-Indigenous textbook frameworks.

She also conducts interdisciplinary research on historical horse–human relationships, drawing from archival materials, environmental history, ethology, Indigenous knowledge, and practical equitation. Through this work, she analyzes events in the history of the U.S. West using a horse-centered, decolonial lens.

Co-sponsor: American Indian Studies

U.S. Obliteration of Indigenous Lands During the Cold War

Tuesday, March 3, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Asian American Cultural Center (1210 W. Nevada St., Urbana, IL 61801)

Description: As the Cold War began, the United States expanded its empire in the Pacific. The U.S. took islands for strategic purposes and literally evaporated some of them with nuclear testing. On the continent the U.S. built dams submerging Indigenous lands under water. This talk explores the impacts of those events.

Presenter: Dave Beck, Ph.D., Professor, Department of History

About the Presenter: David R. M. Beck is the author and co-author of several award-winning books on the history of federal American Indian policy and urban American Indian history, including The Struggle for Self-Determination and City Indian. His book, Unfair Labor?, which Curtis Hinsley called “a master class in historical research and interpretation,” analyzes the labor and economic history of American Indian and Indigenous people who worked at and for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His most recent book, Bribed with Our Own Money, examines federal use of coercion and bribery in an effort to eliminate the U.S. relationship with American Indian nations in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Beck taught in the Native American Studies Department at the University of Montana for more than two decades, and prior to that at NAES (Native American Educational Services) College and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Co-sponsor: American Indian Studies

Treaties for Treatment: How Urban American Indians Navigate the Federal Healthcare Promise

Tuesday, March 24, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Access, Civil Rights & Community (HUB3070, 614 E. Daniel St., Third Floor, Champaign, IL 61820)

Description: Research regarding Urban Indian (American Indians living in cities or major metropolitan areas) healthcare access and experiences remains largely unexplored. This project takes an examines healthcare experiences such as accessing care (IHS and non-HIS care alike) to experiences with delivery of care itself in a sample with 38 Urban Indians.

Presenter: Kiana Wilkins (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs), Ph.D.

About the Presenter: Dr. Kiana Wilkins (Wasco, of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research areas examine medical sociology, Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations, and intersectionality. Dr. Wilkins utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods in her projects, ranging from large population level analyses to interview data. Drawing on interviews with Urban Indians (UI) in two research sites (Houston, Texas and Portland, Oregon), Dr. Wilkins examines treaty established healthcare (i.e. care through Indian Health Services) for American Indians in the United States and UIs healthcare access and utilization experiences.

Co-sponsor: American Indian Studies

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW): Integrating Structural Analysis and Lived Experience to Address Risk and Protective Factors

Tuesday, April 14, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Illini Union, Room C (1401 W. Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801)

Description: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR) has become a critical public health issue that brings together the intersection of structural inequities, historical and ongoing trauma and systemic failures in prevention and response. This presentation will focus on key risk and protective factors at the individual, community, and structural levels, while emphasizing the need to invest in culturally centered prevention frameworks. This discussion will bridge quantitative data with a narrative of familial loss, and address the ethical responsibilities of indigenous communities, government, academia, and other institutions in prevention, intervention, and accountability to protect Indigenous women.

Presenter: Oliviah Walker, M.Ed (she/her), Meskwaki Nation

About the Presenter: Oliviah Walker (she/her) is a citizen of the Meskwaki Nation and is currently serving as the Director of Operations and Planning for the Minnesota Department of Health, overseeing the health equity strategy for the agency. Oliviah’s experience includes roles in tribal, local, and state government addressing social and political determinants of health. She also served as Iowa HHS’ inaugural Health Equity Officer. She has a Master of Education from the University of Minnesota and is completing her Executive MBA in Sustainability from the Yale School of Management in May 2026. Her interests span the intersections of institutional change management, policy and advocacy, and community development, with a dedicated interest in Indigenous governance and capacity building. She lives in Iowa and became an advocate for MMIW after her family member’s disappearance in 2015.

Co-sponsors: American Indian Studies, Illini Union Board, and Women's Resources Center

Cultural Centers as Home-Places: Indigenous Student Affairs Standpoints

Tuesday, April 28, 5:30–6:30 p.m.
Asian American Cultural Center (1210 W. Nevada St., Urbana, IL 61801)

Description: In many Indigenous worldviews, home is not defined by a single structure or fixed location. Rather, home-places emerge from a constellation of relationships (land-based, kin-based, ancestral, and cosmological) that both ground one’s identity and shape one’s responsibilities. Within this framework, the Native American House (NAH) becomes more than a physical space: it is animated through the cultural understandings and daily practices of its professional and student staff, who collectively expand what it means for NAH to serve as a “home away from home.”

Presenters: Native American House Staff

About the Presenters: Learn more about Dr. Charlotte Davidson (Diné/Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation), Native American House (NAH) Director and Morgan Bear (Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi Tribe in Iowa), NAH Assistant Director.

Get more information about the NAH Ambassadors — Justin Bean (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Mia Davlantis (Menominee), Ingrid Gonzalez (Yaqui), and Ashlee Shoemaker (Navajo).

Co-sponsor: American Indian Studies