Panel • Environmental Guesswork

In this panel, Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu), Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), and Bathsheba Demuth (settler) will discuss how the idea of “careful guessing” can contribute to our encounters and ways of thinking with the other-than-human world in the past and present. Looking at environments from Hawaii to Alaska to Antarctica, the discussion will touch on new work in Native American and Indigenous Studies, the environmental humanities, and ways of narrating the world around us.Free, open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070. About the SpeakersJen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu/Eyak) is Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2025 and takes up Indigenous literature and theory on race, indigeneity, and anti-coloniality in polar spaces. She also serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska.Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022) is the recipient of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Best First Book Award and the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Nominations Committee for NAISA. She also sits on the Editorial Boards of the NAIS, Food, Culture, and Society, and Critical Ethnic Studies journals.Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She is an environmental historian specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. For more than two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, she has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.Presented by the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown.