Chair, Native American Programs and Director of Native American Research, University of Maine
he/him
Dr. Ranco serves as Chair of Native American Programs and Coordinator of Native American Research at the University of Maine. His research focuses on the ways in which indigenous communities in the United States resist environmental destruction and how state knowledge systems, rooted in colonial contexts, continue to expose indigenous peoples to an inordinate amount of environmental risk.
A member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, he is particularly interested in how better research relationships can be made between universities, Native and non-Native researchers, and indigenous communities.
Talks
Wabanaki Climate Justice & Adaptation
Dr. Ranco examines current and future climate change impacts to the Wabanaki Tribal Nations and their climate adaptation priorities and activism.
Emphasis will be on how climate change is threatening indigenous livelihoods such as agriculture, hunting and gathering, fishing, forestry, energy, recreation, and tourism, and in turn how these threats are already impacting the physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of Wabanaki and other indigenous people.
Native Americans, the 14th Amendment, and Voting in Maine
Cultural Historian, Penobscot Nation
she/her
Carol Dana works to preserve, share, and teach Penobscot language and storytelling.
She was born in Bangor in 1952 and attended school on Indian Island until the fifth grade. She later attended college in Machias, got married in 1971, and had her first child in 1972 before moving to New York and working on Akwesasne Notes.
Dana returned to Maine to raise a family on Indian Island and started working on the Penobscot Dictionary in 1982. She currently works in the Cultural Historical Preservation Department for the Penobscot Nation. Available for speaking December - March
Talks
Atlohkewe: Tell Me a Story
Dana has researched 189 stories from the Folger library that were oral tradition stories told in winter. Dana’s talk also features stories from In Indian Tents by Abby Alger, Algonquian Legends of New England by Charles Godfrey Leland, Gluscabe the Liar and other Weird Tales by Horace P. Beck, and Silas T. Rand’s Legends of the Micmacs. Dana is winner of the Maine Humanities Council’s 2022 Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize