We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

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The Alien Epistemological Crisis

In 1947, an alien spaceship allegedly crashed in the desert just outside of Roswell, New Mexico. The city now hosts an annual International UFO Festival to commemorate the event; leading UFO experts gather to discuss different versions of this crash, including what are clearly viewed by some attendees as a “better” story – that aliens really did crash in Roswell and the U.S. government conspired to cover it up. What can this festival tell us about wider American society, and especially about the success of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign?

This event was held on March 22, 2021.

Speaker bio

Laura Thursby is a Sessional Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University and in the Cultural Studies Department at Trent University, where she earned her PhD in 2019. Her research seeks to expand upon our understandings of American history by reading the figure of the alien as a symptom of the social, cultural, political, environmental and technical landscapes of the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.