Q&A: Vicente Diaz on deepening engagement with Native communities

To visualize a large portion of Vicente Diaz's life's work and service is to travel to Minneapolis, where, out of a 25-foot shipping container on the Mississippi River's East Bank, his Native Canoe Program made and operated Micronesian and other traditional watercraft. These vessels, which also include canoes from Dakota and other Pacific Islander communities, support Indigenous-based learning that centers human, water, land and sky interrelations for engaged teaching and research.

Like Diaz, who has lineage to both the Micronesian island of Pohnpei and the Philippines and was born in Guam, many program participants come from ancestral lines of voyagers and seafarers. Community members and students from the University of Minnesota, where Diaz was previously tenured, connect with their roots and learn traditional ecological knowledge and practices of original peoples, who sailed long distances using their environment as a guide. These environmental cues include elements such as star patterns for mapping, and even the people themselves, who use the touch of water on their skin to determine currents and sailing conditions.

While Diaz, who founded and directs the program, is far from the thickly wooded banks of the Twin Cities region of the river, he is bringing the mission and canoe program with him to Westwood. His goal is to ensure the survival of Indigenous canoe traditions and ecological knowledge through community-engaged research and learning - or what Diaz would redefine as "community relations building" or "Native peoplehood rebuilding" -utilizing critical and comparative Indigenous studies.

Diaz joined UCLA's faculty this summer as part of a growing Department of American Indian Studies at UCLA, formerly an interdepartmental program that achieved departmental status in 2022. He also is the inaugural associate director for community engagement at UCLA's American Indian Studies Center. Diaz's hiring in both roles is part of a longstanding effort to increase the Native student, faculty and staff populations while deepening UCLA's commitment to research and scholarship into Indigenous studies.

Newsroom spoke with Diaz about how the scholar's work has built an interdiscipline, or what Diaz sometimes calls an "anti-discipline," founded on principles of accountability and relationship to Indigenous people, and why he resists distinguishing the power of academia from the power of Indigeneity.

You often emphasize your refusal to compartmentalize your work in research, teaching and community service. Why do you think it's so important to think of these areas in synergy with one another, especially in Indigenous scholarship?

Indigeneity - the claims and conditions of aboriginality in specific places, of what makes being native to specific places different from other ethnic identities and from modern settler colonial societies and systems - requires and demands labor that is not only academic and certainly not only limited to a discipline. Commitment and accountability to Indigeneity - which is at once a category of being and an abstract analytical concept being developed and advanced by Indigenous scholars - cannot compartmentalize research from teaching from service. Centering Indigeneity is a game change, and for the better.

You presently serve in 10 civic and or community leadership positions and previously served in at least 10 more. What qualities do you possess that have allowed you to have such a full and successful career in these roles?

If there is any one thing that might account for any success or effectiveness I might have had in my career, it is an ambivalence around being an academic as an Indigenous person. I often joke, but seriously, with my graduate students who worry about the deep conflicts associated with mainstream academia and Native people - given academia's direct and indirect hand in land dispossession and colonial extractivism - that I still don't know if I want to be an academic, either, but that I had better figure it out before I retire!

To the undergraduates who likewise worry about what to major in, I tell them, "Shoot, I still don't know what I want to major in, and I'm your professor!" (And your department chair, or director for undergraduate studies, et cetera.) Of course, what I really mean is that proper advancement and training in any given discipline teaches us that learning never ends. We really need to keep learning even beyond our areas of specialty. If you are committed to advancing Native peoplehood in the context of academic knowledge production - which does not have to be colonizing, imperious and extractivist - then you had better learn as much as you can from all disciplines, because our peoples are not one dimensional nor homogeneous.

And, because Indigeneity is very dynamic, the need to learn new things and new approaches never ends. Of course, one has to graduate in a timely manner and learn to concentrate and focus, so one does have to choose a major. But the students get the point.

Can you tell us a little more about the origins of The Native Canoe Program and its mission?

In the Islands we have a saying: "The canoe is the people, and the people is the canoe." The Native Canoe Program runs on this notion, which is also a relation of kinship and an ethic to do a specific kind of academic work that is informed by canoe traditions. It's the form, the vehicle, the platform, for "how I roll."

These kinship and ethical interrelations between humans and canoes are as understandable as relations of kinship and reciprocal caregiving between humans and the natural world. They also model social and political relations for how to "be" in this world. And, so, they also offer us Indigenous models for theorizing and conducting research.

What was your reaction to being offered both the faculty position and the community engagement directorship role at the UCLA American Indian Studies Center?

I was not only excited; I felt honored.

As the inaugural holder of the community engagement role, what is your vision for the center in this area?

My vision is simple but difficult to pull off: to build academic excellence through good relations with Native peoples, and to advance Indigeneity through better forms of academic excellence.