Spring and fall bring our new science talk series to the Olympic Sculpture Park. Each session invites leading researchers to illuminate the natural world through dynamic conversations set against the park’s inspiring collection of sculpture and landscapes.
Contemporary Indigenous Cultures and Knowledge Making
In this talk, geospatial researcher and interdisciplinary artist Aiyesha Ghani-Rivera examines the role of technology in building contemporary knowledge through the lens of Indigenous scholarship and culture.
What’s considered “valid” and “scientific” in research stems from relatively recent systems rooted in bias, dominance, and extraction. But for millennia, Indigenous societies have relied on observation and cultural integration to build and hold knowledge.
Learn about Ghani-Rivera’s current projects as an ORISE Fellow with the US Forest Service at the International Institute of Tropical Forestry in Puerto Rico and her scientific and artistic practice repositioning Indigenous communities as central to imagining the future.
About Aiyesha Ghani-Rivera
Aiyesha M Ghani-Rivera is a Borikén-based (Puerto Rico) geospatial science/arts researcher x ceramic practitioner x AISES 2025 Rematriation Scholar of Jibara-Boricua & South-Asian heritage. Her work uses visual narratives rooted in contemporary indigeneity, carrying muti-ethnic Caribbean island/archipelagic ontologies to reinforce a diaspora/native Boricua cultural identity as a living indigenous epistemology. Her mission is to advocate for the preservation of the lands and waters of Boriken, as well as facilitate indigenous solidarity & sovereignty in collaborative spaces for contemporary arts and science research, as well as cultural preservation through language utiliztion in the arts and sciences, knowledge-making and cultural exchange.
Graduating with a Master of Fine Arts (Interdisciplinary Studio) from The Hartford Art School (2022), and a Master of Science from the University of Oklahoma’s College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences (2025), her research focused on mapping Almastacea Sagittaria lancifolia, a freshwater wetland rush sometimes commonly known as ‘wapato’. She continues to focus on interdisciplinary arts and research in the geosciences, through inclusion and visibility of natural resources as cultural resources, place-based frameworks, and archipelagic geographies. Aiyesha was awarded the American Geophysical Union Student Travel Award in 2025 to present a poster summary of her work entitled “Remote Sensing and Machine Learning as Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge: Connecting Everglades Water Resources, Coqui Conservation, and the return of Yakima Indigenous Foodways”.
Her works are on display across the US, as well as in private collections across the Americas, and their experimental video work has been shown worldwide as part of the “Water, Heritage, & Climate” Miami New Media Festival in 2018/2019. In 2019, they initiated the Higher Ground Collective, which hosted a site-specific international x local group exhibition “In Response to Rising Tides, Falling Water Levels, & Missing Relatives” that addressed the ties between disconnection from natural cycles, gender violence, ecological violence, and the power dynamics underlying patriarchal spaces & climates of crises.
Currently, Ghani-Rivera is an ORISE Research Fellow with the USDA- US Forest Service International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF) in at the University of Puerto Rico’s Jardin Botanico in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico.