10th Annual Urban Native Education Conference: Beyond Borders and Binaries

Today, borders and binaries often shape how we see and move through the world. They appear in nearly every facet of life, from issues of governance, geography, climate change, education, and more. The literal and metaphorical boundaries that shape our worlds are complex and everchanging — they sometimes have the power to unite and strengthen; and, at the same time, their enforcement can wield the power to violently erase, divide, flatten, and silence.

Though themselves intangible, borders and binaries are often placed on and across the very real and the very tangible – land, water, people, and more – resulting in material consequences that can be felt for generations. Their existence also affects how we understand our relationships to place, time, and one another.

For the 10th annual Urban Native Education Conference, we encourage presenters and attendees to think beyond borders and binaries. Native peoples, along with our knowledge, stories, and more-than-human relatives, have existed beyond these modern-day borders and binaries since time immemorial, traversing and trading across land and waterways in relationship with one another. This continues today in the ways that we make, find, and defend the “in-between” spaces that don’t fit neatly within settler colonial frameworks, whether that be in regard to our homelands, our identities, or our relationships. Though many borders and binaries feel longstanding and permanent, many have only been formed and enforced recently. We’ve existed before these borders and binaries, and we will exist after them.

This conference aims to celebrate that work to build a future beyond borders and binaries. We invite Native American and Indigenous community leaders, knowledge keepers and scholars, students, educators, youth, administrators, helpers and staff of educational programs, organizations and institutions from Chicagoland and beyond, to submit a proposal to the 10th Annual Urban Native Education Conference related to work and ideas that move us beyond borders and binaries. We are eager to learn from your experiences gained from creating educational opportunities to prepare future generations of Indigenous leaders to inherit a world ripe with possibility, one free of the constraints of settler-imposed boundaries.

We encourage presenters to imagine this theme in an expansive way, and we hope that folks will see how their work pushes against and beyond borders and binaries. If you are unsure how your work fits within the theme, we encourage you to still submit as all topics related to Indigenous education and knowledge systems will be considered.

Through the exchange of strategies, tools, and research for Native American education in urban communities, our goal is for attendees to engage in meaningful discourse and come away feeling hopeful and inspired by thought-provoking ideas shared from our collective community. And then, like many of our ancestors who traversed lands and waterways from one camp to another, we want attendees to respectfully steward their newly gained knowledge home to share with their communities.

The mission of the CAICC Education Committee is to provide, advocate and support an inter-tribal urban system of education, through networks of Native American Programs and other providers to increase academic and career success for multi-generations that recognizes formal education and tribal cultures/traditions.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Thursday, December 18, 2025 at 11:59 PM