Duke University’s Dr. Ryan Emanuel was invited to the University of Connecticut’s Storrs campus as part of the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series’ 29th season. Emanuel will talk about his experiences culminating into his newly released book “On The Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice” on Thursday, Sept. 18, in The Dodd Center’s Konover Auditorium.  

Dr. Ashley Helton, an associate professor at UConn’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, gave an opening address to introduce Emanuel.  
 
Helton told the audience that there were two co-chairs for the Teale Lecture Series’ planning committee for the first time in the history of the series. Speaking of history, Helton said, “The beginning was interdisciplinary, promoting conversations about the environment.” She continued that the messaging of the series was “to protect biodiversity and the quality of life on earth” and “this protection will not succeed unless the approach to it is multidisciplinary.”  

Emanuel began his talk by talking about the Indigenous and other marginalized communities who shoulder disproportionate social issues, including in terms of the environment.  
 
Before coming to UConn, Emanuel read the Native American Cultural Programs website and said the land acknowledgment page is “not stuck in the past tense.” He would later say, “I do critique performative land acknowledgments” and discussed how he likes to imagine land acknowledgments as a longer story beyond the buzzwords.  
 
He then talked about his Lumbee background, which is an Indigenous American tribe originating in what’s now known as North Carolina. “My homeland is one marked by colonialism,” Emanuel said. He illustrates this through excerpt readings. 

On his book, Emanuel said “I start out the entire book to consider this wider context by outlining our long history of colonialism.” He would then say, “I wrote this book for my people, the Lumbee, but also our Indigenous neighbors and kin.” 
 
“I didn’t actually set out to write a book,” Emanuel said. He currently works as a hydrologist and the closest thing to a career writing literature about his position is that he’s a professor on the subject.  
 
“The Lumbee community said that the purpose of education was to serve your people,” Emanuel said. He then followed that up with a saddening reality told in a comedic way: “The first day I was in the same room as a Native American professor was on my first day of teaching. I was that professor.” Emanuel talked about how it was difficult for him to find ways to help his people as a professor and scientist. He said, “Our political identities can help or hinder our ability to help our people. 
 
Emanuel then directed his attention to the Lumbee River, which he refers to as home and has a lot of cultural significance to the Lumbee people.  

“Cultural attachments to water help keep us rooted,” he said. “Everybody benefits from meaningful tribal engagement, and everybody suffers when that engagement doesn’t happen.”  

His love of the Lumbee River — not as a possession to exploit and profit from but something closer to a loved one — inspired him to string together a collection of nonfiction prose about his experiences advocating for the environment. 
 
Emanuel then introduced a social vulnerability map, which he described as “a composite index that represents a community’s capacity to recover from adverse events.” He showed that gas pipelines correlate with higher social vulnerability. He shared a statistic about how “1% [of the] state population [has] 13% of the people impacted” by natural gas pipeline projects to drill in this point. Furthermore, poultry gut bacteria in Hurricane Florence floodwaters causing disease points to even more environmental issues. 
 
Emanuel also explained that during the American Civil War, the Lumbee, as well as other people of color, were in danger of getting conscripted into hard labor, so they hid in an attempt to avoid the brutality. Luckily, freedom fighters against white supremacy, led by the Lumbee Henry Berry Lowry, fought off the oppressors. This is known as the Lowry War. Since Lowry’s burial grounds are unknown, the Lumbee River represents him. 
 

There was then a Q&A session. One attendee asked about the social vulnerability map and how it was accessed, to which Emanuel said it was based on U.S. census data and the Center for Disease Control.