Featuring three panelists, Monday’s symposium is titled Latin American Indigenous Movements in the 21st Century: Frontiers of Activism. It takes place in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., and is sponsored by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the environmental studies program, the anthropology department, the social science division and the Multicultural Center at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Tuesday’s roundtable discussion is titled Indigenous Environmental Activism Among Near and Distant Neighbors and includes two of the Monday panelists and two Native Americans from Maine. It will explore forms and roles of native environmentalism and its engagements with Western environmental policies. This takes place in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St., and is sponsored by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the environmental studies program and the Multicultural Center.

The programs have been put together by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College faculty including a group associated with the Latin American Studies general education concentration at the college. General education concentrations, or GECs, part of the college’s core curriculum, are groupings of courses oriented around a common theme and often drawn from diverse academic departments and programs.

Monday’s panel is composed of three activists involved in indigenous politics in Latin America: Patricia Gualinga, Victor Montejo and Trevor Stevenson ’00.

Gualinga is a member of the Kichwa indigenous community of Sarayaku in Amazonian Ecuador. She has spent years leading the community against oil exploration on indigenous lands, a process that has put Sarayaku in the international spotlight. Gualinga has also ensured that women’s voices are heard in the movement for indigenous rights and environmental justice.

Her efforts have taken her around the world and led to collaborations with non-governmental organizations in the United States and Ecuador, as well as participation within the Ecuadorian government and CONAIE, Ecuador’s national indigenous federation.

Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya from the Northwestern Highlands of Guatemala, where he was a schoolteacher before coming to the United States. He fled Guatemala in 1982, after his brother, also a teacher, was assassinated by government soldiers and his own name appeared on death lists.

For the last eight years Montejo has chaired the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. In 2003, he gave up a Fulbright grant to run for Congress in Guatemala, and was elected in December of that year. He is the author of several books.

Stevenson is originally from Wyoming, where he was involved in environmental and indigenous issues. He has worked with indigenous movements in Latin America for more than a decade and has extensive experience in coordination between indigenous peoples and local governments and NGOs. He has served as the executive co-director of the Washington, D.C.-based Amazon Alliance for Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and their Environment.

Gualinga and Stevenson will join two members of Maine Wabanaki tribes in Tuesday’s event. Brenda Commander is serving her fourth term as chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians. She is overseeing tribal efforts to restore the Meduxnekeag River, a tributary of the St. John River that flows through tribal lands. Through partnerships with private and government agencies in Canada and the United States, the tribe is improving the water quality of the river for cultural and environmental reasons.

John Banks has been director of the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Natural Resources since the department’s founding in 1980. During that time he has overseen the implementation of an extensive water quality testing program for the Penobscot River to ensure that the river complies with state and federal clean water standards.

In addition, Banks and his department have played an important role in the newly formed Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which is raising money to pay for a removal of dams that would reopen 1,000 miles of river habitat along the Penobscot.

Sarah Davis '10 (center) with NASAP growers at the Lewiston Farmers' Market.

If soup makes the soldier, as Napoleon Bonaparte said, it does a pretty good job shaping students, too.

Issues around food have an unusual teaching potential, a power rooted in one simple fact: everybody eats. And its branches reach out to nearly every corner of the human endeavor.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the topic of food tends to invoke “issues of stewardship and sustainability, writ large,” says Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. “And poverty and social justice, because there’s no escaping the fact that food is huge in terms of social inequity.”

That scope holds true for the community activities, both volunteer and academically driven, that the Harward Center funds and coordinates year-round.

For instance, this past summer Sarah Davis ’10 worked for a Maine-based nonprofit, administering the Lewiston Farmers’ Market and helping immigrants learn the ways of American farming.

Meanwhile, Ariel Garfinkel ’08 taught kids in Lewiston where food comes from and how to cook it. Also working with youth was Andie Bisceglia ’09, who spent her summer at the Hillview apartments running a program for Lots to Gardens — an agency, founded by Kirsten Walter ’00, that uses gardening projects to strengthen community and support local young people.

For all three, the summer work illuminated the studies that awaited them when autumn came around. In her Harward-funded position with the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project, Davis guided farmers from Somalia and Guatemala in getting their produce to market. “I learned so much about the people that I worked with,” she says.

The work gave her “a first-hand perspective on the idea of difference” — a perspective valuable to her self-designed major exploring issues of difference and conflict in a context of social justice.

As a vehicle for teaching, food is distinctively useful as an exemplar across disciplines. “Pedagogy functions on the assumption that we start where people are and push them to someplace new,” Bartel says. “And everyone can start where they are with food. So pedagogically, it’s really powerful.”

All the more so given today’s mass critique of the food-industrial system. “Food and sustainable agriculture are perfect examples of readily identifiable areas where ordinary citizens can actually do a fair amount of research,” Bartel adds.

“There’s a lot of good information out there,” she says. “People can move from problem identification to problem solving, to living in a set of commitments that promote sustainable answers. And that, right there, is the model of what we think liberal education is doing in the world.”

“I came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ just wanting to be an environmental studies major,” but not knowing how many directions that might take her in, says Bisceglia. “There’s just so many options. And I think farming and local food combine them all.”

By Doug Hubley, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

An exhibition of photographs titled Cultura y Naturaleza Guatemalteca (Culture and Nature in Guatemala) by photographer Challen Willemsen, a first-year ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College student from Guatemala City, Guatemala, is on display through March 26 in the Chase Gallery, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Avenue. The exhibit opens with a gallery reception featuring food and music from Guatemala at 7 p.m. Friday, March 12. The public is invited to attend the reception and the exhibit free of charge. Call 207-786-8376 for more information.

The display features approximately 40 photographs of orchids and other Guatemalan floral species, cultural representations, architecture and people. As a high school student, Willemsen attended the American School of Guatemala, where he developed an interest in the country’s orchid species. He began his own collection that now amounts to more than 3,000 plants. As his interest in the plants grew, he began to photograph them and to create a large database. Eventually, says Willemsen, an environmental studies major with an expected minor in Latin American history, he hopes to publish the entire collection as a field guide to Guatemalan orchid species.