The Native American House

10/29/2026

At this week’s Dinner on Us, Alex Quintanilla and Dr. Sandra D. Espinoza Montes led a conversation on listening to what our bodies need without judgment, held in connection with No Body Shaming Week. Alex and Sandra are part of the Counseling Center’s Native American Outreach Team and are two of our embedded supports, so you may have already seen them at the House during their drop-in hours! If anything stayed with you from their talk, the Counseling Center holds drop-in hours at the Native American House every Wednesday.

Thank you to Alex and Sandra for sharing their time, to the AACC for hosting us, and to everyone who shared in dinner and conversation with us!

10/25/2026

Today’s displays of racist stereotypes, including their amplification through local media, at the Illinois football game compel us to speak with clarity and resolve:

The Native American House refuses to remain silent while the campus and local community celebrate and normalize stereotypes that demean Native peoples, diminish our humanity, and undermine our authority to represent our own cultures and identities.

We call for a shared commitment across Illinois and our campus to reject racist stereotyping of Native peoples and address its presence in university spaces and athletic environments. The responsibility for addressing this issue cannot continue to fall on the very communities subjected to it. The Native American House will continue to create spaces of care, resistance, and accurate self-representation, while calling on our campus community to uphold its commitments to belonging through visible, meaningful action.

10/23/2026

Join us tomorrow!! Food, arts and crafts, and fun!

Join us next Saturday for community zine making with the University Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign! The theme will be "My Culture is not Your Costume," and participants will collaborate on zine pages that will be digitized by the library and printed into a zine. Supplies will be provided, and no experience is needed! There will also be food, music, and community!

📍 Native American House
📅 Saturday, October 24th @ 1-5pm

10/22/2026

Join us next Tuesday, October 27th, for our next Dinner on Us! We'll be at the Asian American Cultural Center at 5:30pm to hear from Dr. Sandra D. Espinoza Montes and Alex Quintanilla from the University of Illinois Counseling Center, who will be giving the talk, "Our Relationship with Our Food and Ourselves." The presentation will focus on body acceptance and intuitive eating, and is presented in connection with No Body Shaming Week on campus. See you there!

📅 Tues. October 27th
⏰ 5:30-6:30 pm
📍 Asian American Cultural Center
🍴 Food is first come, first served

10/21/2026

Thank you everyone who joined us at Dinner on Us last night with Dr. Natasha Myhal (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians). We enjoyed learning about Anishinaabe natural resource sovereignty, especially the nmé and their role. Thank you to the Asian American Cultural Center at Illinois for hosting us, and for everyone who showed up to enjoy good food and a great talk!

See you all next week for Dinner on Us: "Our Relationship with Our Food and Ourselves" with Alex Quintanilla and Dr. Sandra D. Espinoza Montes from the University of Illinois Counseling Center!

10/20/2026

We had a great time at this year's Read & Resist Festival on October 14th! Assistant Director Morgan, Ambassador Mia, and Ambassador Evan tabled alongside other identity-based units and library units for a tabling event dedicated to Banned Books Week.

Our table highlighted some selections from our Greg Rogers Collection of American Indian/Indigenous youth literature that have been banned or challenged in at least one state, often multiple. Our Ambassadors, with help from the IDEA Lab at the Grainger Engineering Library , made miniature keychains to resemble these books and handed them out next to our typical swag.

Thank you so much to all the participating units for all your work putting this event on!

10/20/2026

Thank you to everyone who joined us last Monday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2026, “Not Your Mascot: The Impact of (Mis)Representation”! We’re grateful to have shared community with all of you.

The day began at the Spurlock Museum with a Recognition of Place and Welcome, followed by the panel “Telling Our Own Stories: Reclaiming Indigenous Representation” with NAH’s Dr. Charlotte Davidson and Morgan Bear. After a community feed, we screened “Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting” and held a dialogue with filmmakers Ben West and Yancey Burns and our NAH Ambassadors. We finished with outdoor community printmaking at the Native American House.

Thank you to Ben West and Yancey Burns for joining us, to our NAH Ambassadors, and to the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures for hosting. Thank you also to our partners: University of Illinois Center for Civic Education & Justice, University of Illinois, American Indian Studies, the Center for Indigenous Science, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Access, Civil Rights & Community.

We’ll see you again for Native American Heritage Month in November! The full schedule is up now: https://nah.illinois.edu/events/native-american-heritage-month

10/19/2026

Join us tomorrow night at AACC!

Our next Dinner on Us is Tuesday, October 20 at 5:30 PM at the Asian American Cultural Center!

Dr. Natasha Myhal (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, will present “Renewed Geographies of Belonging: Anishinaabe Natural Resource Sovereignty in Michigan.”

Dr. Myhal’s talk draws on her community-engaged research with the Tribal Natural Resources Department of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians in Manistee, Michigan, including the Nmé (Lake Sturgeon) restoration program and the Elders’ meal program. It looks at how relational approaches to caring for land and water challenge colonial models of resource governance, and how they reaffirm Ottawa relationships to place and their more-than-human kin.

📅 Tuesday, October 20, 5:30 PM
📍 Asian American Cultural Center
🍽️ First come, first served dinner
🔗 https://nah.illinois.edu/programs/dinner-us

10/13/2026

Our next Dinner on Us is Tuesday, October 20 at 5:30 PM at the Asian American Cultural Center!

Dr. Natasha Myhal (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, will present “Renewed Geographies of Belonging: Anishinaabe Natural Resource Sovereignty in Michigan.”

Dr. Myhal’s talk draws on her community-engaged research with the Tribal Natural Resources Department of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians in Manistee, Michigan, including the Nmé (Lake Sturgeon) restoration program and the Elders’ meal program. It looks at how relational approaches to caring for land and water challenge colonial models of resource governance, and how they reaffirm Ottawa relationships to place and their more-than-human kin.

📅 Tuesday, October 20, 5:30 PM
📍 Asian American Cultural Center
🍽️ First come, first served dinner
🔗 https://nah.illinois.edu/programs/dinner-us

10/10/2026

Join the Native American House on Monday, October 12, for Indigenous Peoples’ Day at Illinois.

This year’s theme, “Not Your Mascot: The Impact of (Mis)Representation,” invites our community to learn and reflect about Indigenous representation.

View the full schedule: https://nah.illinois.edu/events/indigenous-peoples-day