Event Details
Seeds follows Ziggy, a thirty-something Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) woman, who is offered her first gig as an online influencer, promoting for Nature’s Oath, a seed and fertilizer company. When her cousin summons her back to the rez, she is forced into a battle to save her people’s legacy. Post screening discussion with Akwesasne Cultural Center Director, Justin Cree, and Professor/Poet, Rebecca Pelky!
Guests
Justin Cree, Akwesasne Cultural Center Director
Justin Cree is from Akwesasne and is of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (People of the Flint), Wakathahión:ni (I am Wolf Clan). A graduate of St. Lawrence University, Justin returned home to serve his community. Justin spent the next 14 years working for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, and the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino.
In good fortune and timing an opportunity to become the Director of the Akwesasne Cultural Center presented itself. With much purpose and of course the books, Justin accepted the position of Director of the Akwesasne Cultural Center in April of 2022. Justin is committed to the Akwesasne Cultural Center goal to preserve, educate, and elevate Kanienʼkehá꞉ka culture.
Rebecca Pelky, Professor and Poet
Rebecca Pelky is a citizen of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin and an assistant professor at Le Moyne College. Some of her interdisciplinary research has focused on representations of Indigenous peoples in Native and non-Native film and literature, with a concentration on issues of self-representation and sovereignty. A book chapter on Indigenous horror film is forthcoming from Routledge in 2026, and her research on poem-films, a short film genre, situates this emerging hybrid form as fruitful space for engaging with questions of identity, community, and continuance.
Dr. Pelky is also a poet. Her first book, Horizon of the Dog Woman (Saint Julian Press), was published in January, 2020. Her second book, Through a Red Place, won the 2021 Perugia Press Prize. It is a bilingual collection of poems which responds to archival, historical, and field research to consider how Native and non-Native people have historically utilized the same land. She is working on her third manuscript, funded by a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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