Jasper Ridge Lecture Series Hosts Scholars on Indigenous Stewardship and Sovereignty during Winter Quarter 2026

This year’s Jasper Ridge Community Lecture Series opened in the Fall 2025 quarter with presentations from Muwekma Ohlone women leaders on Tribal sovereignty and language revitalization. The series continued with themes of Indigenous sovereignty and environmental stewardship into Winter 2026, as we hosted three speakers that shared their scholarly work as allies in partnership with Indigenous leaders. 

In his talk “Cultural and Natural Landscapes of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe,” Dr. Michael Wilcox, Senior Lecturer of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford, provided valuable background with a history of Muwekma Ohlone presence and persistence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Professor Deborah Sivas of Stanford Law School and lead of the Environmental Law Clinic has litigated and advocated for land rights with the Pit River Tribe and Northern Chumash Tribal Council in California. Her talk entitled “Tribal Land Stewardship: Opportunities and Challenges” invited deeper conversation with the audience on the barriers and solutions to returning land rights to tribes. Dr. Lee Panich, Fay Boyle Professor in Anthropology at Santa Clara University, shared his scholarship on the process of European and American colonists acquiring ancestral Ohlone lands in the southern San Francisco Bay Area. The talk sharply focused on the mid-19th century as a critical time just before statehood, when land dispossession irrevocably fractured Ohlone lifeways.

Momentum and partnership are growing at Stanford University for Indigenous stewardship. So far this year, the Indigenous Stewardship for Sustainability conference was hosted on campus, and an intertribal cultural burn was implemented at the preserve. With these lecture events and the community conversations they have fostered, Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (‘Ootchamin ‘Ooyakma) continues to be a collaborative teaching and learning space for two-eyed seeing.

Captioned video recordings of the AY25-26 Jasper Ridge Community Lecture series are now available on our new website. You can browse the “Past Jasper Ridge Lecture Series and Symposia” page for a list of speakers and topics, and click on the topic to see the original event descriptions. A link to the recording is available at the bottom of each event page. 

Image credit: Diseño del Rancho San Leandro, Land Case Map A-59. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Authors:

Katie Glover, Associate Director of Environmental Education, Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma)

Tadashi Fukami, Faculty Director, Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma), and Professor of Biology and Earth System Science