The Planning Committee for the ASU symposium, Black Trans Futurities: Political Imaginaries in the Academy and the Arts (March 20-21, 2025), acknowledges the twenty-three Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries. Arizona State University’s four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples. We thank and honor the Native tribes and sovereign nations of the Salt River Valley—including the Akimel O’odham, Onk Akimel O'odham, and Piipaash nations—whose knowledge, care, and stewardship of the land and waterways allow us to be here now We also recognize the sovereignty of these nations. 

As Gender Studies scholars, we are advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies into our course curricula and study. Several of us have taught from, as one example in Transgender Studies, the Transgender Studies Quarterly special issue, “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary” (2014). At our symposium we are eager to collectively think through trans* “pedagogies of crossing” (Alexander 2006) between black trans* and Indigenous/Two-Spirit politics, cultures, embodiments that build on the generative scholarly conversations between black feminists and Native feminists. As a planning committee and people living on this land, we consider “right relations” and a politics of “grounded relationality” (Byrd 2019) as something we are moving toward intentionally rather than something we have already accomplished.

Lately, the planning committee has been learning from the fierce instantiations of global indigenous solidarity between the Tono O’odham Nation – youth and adults – who have expressed public and movement-based solidarity with Palestinians during the ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza by the settler-colonial Israel nation-state. The Real News Network (2019) and the linktree site, oodhamsoldaritywithpalestine report that the U.S/Immigration Customs and Enforcement (I.C.E) uses Israeli Surveillance systems to surveil the Tohono O’odham Nation in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. For more on these insurgent mappings of settler-colonial violence and the powerful translocal solidarity movements in Arizona and the Southwest, please follow the Arizona Palestine Solidarity Movement.

The following is a list of the 23 tribes in Arizona:

Ak-Chin Indian Community

Cocopah Indian Tribe

Colorado River Indian Tribes*

Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation

Fort Mojave Indian Tribe*

Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe

Gila River Indian Community

Havasupai Tribe

Hia-Ced O'odham Tribe

Hopi Tribe

Hualapai Tribe

Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians

Navajo Nation*

Pascua Yaqui Tribe

Pueblo of Zuni

Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community

San Carlos Apache Tribe

San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe

Tohono O'odham Nation

Tonto Apache Tribe

White Mountain Apache Tribe

Yavapai-Apache Tribe

Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe

*Reservation boundaries extend into neighboring states