Students in Cornell's American Indian Program (AIP) have been encouraged to participate in the eighth annual United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), May 18-29 in New York City.

The AIP has also strengthened its support for students and scholars, with recent membership in the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies and the acquisition of a critical resource, the Huntington Free Library collection of Native American materials, in 2004.

AIP associate director Carol Kalafatic and Tonya Gonnella Frichner, one of the 16 members of the UNPFII and an advocate for the rights of indigenous women and girls, gave a presentation to students March 7 at Akwe:kon. The forum, an advisory body and subsidiary of the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council, has a mandate to discuss indigenous issues related to economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health and human rights.

The U.N. forum will allow students to observe, network, collect research materials and have opportunities to "enrich their base of knowledge and expand networks of support for indigenous peoples," said Kalafatic, a senior consultant to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization who has advocated within the U.N. system for indigenous people's rights since 1995.

"We are struggling to have our voices heard over the much louder voices of the private sector in the international policy arena," Kalafatic said. "It's really nothing new for indigenous peoples."

The U.N. is "a critical site where intervention is being made," said Jolene Rickard, an associate professor of the history of art who studies native visuality and aesthetic practice.

This year's forum will include a study by Andrea Smith, a 2008 visiting scholar in critical theory, examining the impact of the boarding school system on indigenous peoples, Kalafatic said. "There are also higher education issues discussed at the forum that are perfect for our students, and our graduate students interested in language revitalization could also benefit from participating," she said.

The March 7 information session followed a Haudenosaunee women's roundtable discussion, which AIP hosted to help Frichner prepare her report to the UNPFII session. The women discussed violence against women in Indian communities. Frichner is also a citizen of the Onondaga Nation and a founder of the American Indian Law Alliance.

Participation in the U.N. forum is one of an expanding set of opportunities in American Indian studies at Cornell for scholarship and engagement.

"Cornell could actually be a center for research into reforms in indigenous issues," Rickard said. "The AIP has begun that process, and we'd like to encourage scholarship in this area."

The AIP has also joined the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (NCAIS), with 18 member institutions in the United States and Canada. The consortium is transnational in scope and organizes conferences, symposia, workshops and courses. It also provides fellowship opportunities for graduate students and faculty from its seven member universities.

Rickard said she is developing a scholarly journal at Cornell "tied to the representation of indigeneity globally," with funding from the Ford Foundation.

"I'm involved in a more formal analysis of the presence of indigenous peoples in this area," she said. "It's a part of crafting this idea of sovereignty or self-determination or sustainability." The research intersects with the experiences of many scholars in AIP, she added.

In 2004, Cornell acquired the Huntington Free Library's Native American collection, one of the largest in the world, with more than 40,000 volumes on the archaeology, ethnology and history of American native peoples from colonial times to the present. Rickard called the collection "one of the most under-evaluated holdings of 20th-century political thought and visual material in North America."

Cornell now ranks in the top three research libraries for American Indian studies in North America, with the Newberry Library and the Library of Congress. The Huntington Library was a companion to collections in the recently minted National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. Both were formerly housed in The Bronx.

"Our first graduate student in art history is coming here [in 2009-10] because of her awareness of the collection," Rickard said. "Cornell can eventually be an amazing magnet for American Indian scholars."