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Writer and mountain climber David Roberts gave a talk titled “Writing about Adventure – Including Your Own” at Hamilton College Wednesday, November 8. Roberts has gone on 13 climbing expeditions in Alaska and the Yukon and has published 19 books based on his climbing experiences. During his talk he presented slides and descriptions of his expeditions which ranged from climbing Denali, Mt. Deborah and Mt. Huntington.

Visual artist Shelley Niro, a Mohawk woman and member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, showed several of her films on October 17 in the Science Center Auditorium. Niro, whose photography is now on display in the “Native Perspectives” exhibit in the Emerson Gallery, presented two short experimental films and clips from two longer films. Her films presented Native people in a variety of ways, sometimes humorously and other times very seriously, and her style encompassed both experimental and more conventional narrative-style films.

Theobald Gakwaya, a Rwandan genocide survivor, lectured with the aid of a translator at Hamilton College’s Science Center Auditorium to a large group of students and faculty on the issue of Rwandan genocide on September 18. Gakwaya was a minister to the Rwandan government for one year and has since dedicated his efforts to human rights issues. Calling the genocide in Rwanda the “great humanitarian disaster of the contemporary world,” Gakwaya spoke about the social, political and economic history and problems surrounding the political and ethnic upheaval between the Hutus and the Tutsis. He told the audience that the Rwandan conflict has brought the whole area of the great African lakes onto the brink of war with an estimated five million people dead: two million Rwandan and three million Congolese.

On Monday September 11, Hamilton hosted a panel discussion, "Debating China’s Future: Two Contrasting Perspectives" presented by the Edwin Lee Fund and the Levitt Center. Two authorities on China, Minxin Pei and James Sasser, spoke, debated, and answered the questions of faculty and students on China’s current and possible future economic and social status in front of a full audience in the Science Center auditorium.