Rethinking Violence Against Indigenous Women Through a Lens of Human Rights

media release: The 2023 Mildred Fish-Harnack Human Rights and Democracy Lecture will take place in the Alumni Lounge of the Pyle Center. A Zoom option is also available.

Shannon Speed (Chickasaw) is director of the American Indian Studies Center, professor of American Indian studies, anthropology, and gender studies, and special advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for twenty-five years in Mexico and the United States on issues of indigenous rights, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, and activist research. Her books include the award-winning Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State (UNC Press 2020) and the co-edited volume with Dr. Lynn Stephen, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press 2021). She is currently working on a new book with her own tribal nation entitled, Chickasaw Rising: Law and Resurgent Sovereignty in the Chickasaw Nation. She is a recipient of the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year award from the Chickasaw Nation and the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Dr. Speed recently served as the president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA 2018-2021).

The Mildred Fish-Harnack Human Rights and Democracy Lecture is named after a Milwaukee native who was a UW–Madison student in the 1920s. While living in Germany, Fish-Harnack assisted in the escape of German Jews and political dissidents. She is the only American civilian executed under the personal instruction of Adolf Hitler, for her resistance to the Nazi regime. This lectureship is designed to promote a greater understanding of human rights and democracy, and enrich international studies at UW-Madison. The lecture brings to campus a person who contributes to the cause of human rights through academic scholarship and/or active leadership. UW-Madison's Office of International Studies and Programs established the lecture in 1994 and coordinated it until the Human Rights Program was created.