We'll just go ahead and get going here.
Tonight, to start things off, our invocation
will be done by Dr. Patricia Gonzalez, who is
Kickapoo, Comanche, in Nahua.
She is a fourth-year affiliated faculty here
and her specialty is Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous
healing systems and medicine.
She really enjoys working with graduate students
and she loves Tucson.
I'll turn it over to her right now.
Thank you.
I want to thank-- first of all, I
want to thank for the invitation to offer the blessing,
and my blessing is going to come in the form of a song.
And I really want to wish Dr. Washburn well tonight
with her words.
We're so fortunate to hear your words in the setting
in this beautiful place.
The song actually is a family song,
and it is a song that came--
was given to me after I went to the Kickapoo,
one of our grand villages in Illinois where
my great-great-great grandparents had lived and when
they moved--
were eventually displaced into the Old Mexico,
which back then included Texas.
And so this song calls out to the children
and to the old beings of the universe.