MOUNT VERNON — Ian McIntosh, an advocate for indigenous populations worldwide, will lecture on “Building Bridges: Aboriginal Reconciliation in Australia’s Outback” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons at Cornell College. Admission is free.
His presentation is part of a lecture series, “Community, Agency and Action: Social Change in the New Century,” that will feature two additional speakers during the academic year. The lectures offer insight into the life of social activism and provide practical lessons about dedicating a life to social change. The lecture series is in its second year.
McIntosh is an applied anthropologist and managing director of Cultural Survival Inc. and an associate with the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Cultural Survival Inc. was launched after development began in the 1960s in the Amazonian regions of South America, which deeply affected the indigenous peoples living there. Other incidents revealed that governments worldwide were seeking to extract resources from areas that had not been developed and consequently were mistreating indigenous inhabitants.
McIntosh specializes in human rights and reconciliation, indigenous peoples and development, international law and “fourth world” self-determination, and nonprofit management. An expert in alternative dispute resolution, he has acted as a mediator between indigenous peoples and multinational corporations. He has published two books, 16 articles and over 30 essays, editorials and reviews.