Patricia Longley Cochran to present Cash Lecture at USD
Longley Cochran, an Inupiaq Eskimo born and raised in Nome, Alaska, is executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. Her presentation entitled, “Indigenous People and Climate Change,” will discuss her involvement as chair of the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change. A reception follows the lecture, which is free and open to the public.
The former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an international organization that represents 155,000 Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Russia and Greenland, Longley Cochran previously served as administrator of the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. She was executive director of the Alaska Community Development Corporation and local government program director with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
A program of the USD Institute of American Indian Studies, the Cash Memorial Lecture was inaugurated in 1995 to promote education and awareness of American Indian culture, issues and problems. Supported by an endowment established by Joseph Harper Cash’s family and friends, the lecture annually features scholars in the fields of Indian studies, frontier, Western and mining history – the four major areas of Cash’s interests. Cash, from Bonesteel, S.D., was dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at USD for a decade. In his lifetime, he forged lifelong friendships with Indian and non-Indian people, and admonished his students to remember history from small places. His memorial lecture series is built on that thesis.
For more information regarding the 15th annual Joseph Harper Cash Memorial Lecture, contact the Institute of American Indian Studies at The U, (605) 677-5208 or e-mail [email protected].