Video Transcript: Higher Education’s Role in Serving Indigenous Communities

[No Audio].

Mike Greer: Hello, everyone. My name is Mike Greer. I work in the Innovation and Operations department at the President's Office.  

Before we get started, I would like to let you know about a few event logistics. First, the event will be recorded and posted to our public-facing site for future reference. In addition, captions and a transcript are being provided by a certified realtime captioner. If you have technical issues during the event, please direct message Kristina England through Zoom.

As with all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility events, this is a time to learn and to share. You may have a lot of questions based on today's content and there may be topics that are completely new to you. We encourage you to ask any and all questions so that we can all grow together. Questions can be provided in one of three ways during the open conversations portion of the event. You can post a question via chat for everyone to see. You could direct message me with any anonymous questions or during the open dialogue after the presentation, you could use the raise hand feature in Zoom and ask a live question.

During the presentation, I will be gathering all the questions that are posted in chat so we can discuss them during the open conversation portion. I would now like to welcome Nefertiti Walker, Deputy Vice President for Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and Equity, who will introduce the presenters for today's event.    

Nefertiti: Thanks, Mike.    

Mike: No problem.

Nefertiti:  Good afternoon, folks. As Mike said, my name is  Nefertiti Walker. I am the Deputy Vice President for  Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and Equity, in the UMass President's Office. I am also -- some of you might know me as Vice Chancellor at UMass Amherst with Office of Equity and Inclusion and a faculty member at the Isenberg School of Management. I am here today to introduce our event, which is titled, Higher Education's Role in Serving Indigenous Communities: An Indigenous Peoples' Day Program. I am very excited to be here. So excited for the conversation that is going to be happening as well.

To begin, the University is in an ongoing process of reconciliation with the history of colonization, and engaging in relationships with native nations and people. However, there is no formal President's Office land acknowledgement. None the less, I am in my own process of reconciliation with the ways I have been personally harmed but also privileged by Colonization, and I would like to acknowledge that am giving this introduction from current day Worcester, which is founded and built on the homelands of Nipmuc peoples.  

Thank you for joining us today to learn about higher education's role in serving Indigenous communities. The purpose of today's event is to explore the intersections of land acknowledgement and Indigenous engagement  within the University of Massachusetts. UMass Amherst professor Sonya Atalay and Cedric Woods, a professor at UMass Boston, will lead a conversation about higher education's role in serving Indigenous communities. They will delve into the historical backgrounds of the University of Massachusetts campuses, shed light on the significance of land acknowledgement, and recognizing Indigenous homelands, and discuss challenges and best practices for fostering meaningful relationships and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous tribes and students. The objectives for this event are to increase your understanding of the impact of land acknowledgement, to gain insights with experts with experience in Indigenous engagement, join dynamic discussions and share your unique perspectives, and acquire practical insights for fostering inclusivity and connection across the university.  

I'm going to pause and  exit out of my -- there we go -- my inbox because otherwise, we are going to get dinged constantly and no one wants to hear that, so --

I would like to acquaint you with our honorable and well-accomplished speakers and guests for today - I will start with Dr. Cedric Woods, who is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. He has over a decade of tribal government experience with a research background and has served as Director of UMass Institute for Native American Studies since 2009. The institute's purpose is to connect Native New England with university research, innovation and education. Currently, Dr. .Woods is working on projects with tribes in the areas of tribal government, capacity building, Indian education, economic development, and chronic disease prevention. Prior to arriving at UMass Boston, Dr. Woods completed a study on the evolution of the tribal government among the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. 

While pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of Connecticut, he served in a variety of capacities for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. These positions included director of career development, research analyst, tribal government spokesman, and deputy chief operating officer. Dr. Woods has served as a consultant for the National Museum of the American Indian, the Haliwa SaponiIndian Tribe of North Carolina, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Plimoth Plantation, a bicultural living history museum  
in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Dr. Sonya Atalay (Anishinaabe-Ojibwe) is an Indigenous archaeologist utilizing community-based participatory methods to conduct research in full participation with Indigenous communities. Dr. Atalay’s scholarship crosses disciplinary boundaries, incorporating aspects of cultural anthropology, archaeology, critical heritage studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is currently involved in producing a series of research-based comics about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA law. I have actually seen some of these comics -- early editions. I don't know what they look like now, but they were fantastic when Sonya gave me a sneak peek maybe a couple of years ago now. 

In her most recent work, Dr. Atalay is exploring ways that repatriation and reclaiming of tangible and intangible heritage are teachers that provide essential lessons for decolonizing and Indigenizing institutions. This work will be published in her forthcoming “Braiding Knowledge: How Indigenous Knowledge is Challenging and Changing Universities,” which will be published by University of Arizona Press. Dr. Atalay’s work examines how repatriation can contribute to healing from historical trauma. Centering Anishinaabe epistemologies and concepts of well-being, Dr. Atalay is working on a series of land-based collaborative projects that involve intergenerational Indigenous knowledge production and knowledge mobilization practices. Working with Indigenous youth and elders, she explores collaborative production of comics, animation, and virtual reality applications as part of 21st century Indigenous story work processes.

I cannot introduce Dr. Atalay without mentioning the newly launched Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. Dr. Atalay will serve as the Director of this international indigenous science and technology center, which is funded by the largest grant ever received by UMass Amherst, a five-year -- I believe the largest grant received by the system actually -- a five-year 30 million dollar grant. The center will focus on connecting indigenous knowledges with western sciences to address some of the most pressing issues of our time. She and her colleagues will take a transdisciplinary approach to work on complex, evolving challenges brought on by climate change, including dire impacts affecting land, water, plant, and animal life, the danger posed to irreplaceable archaeological sites sacred places and cultural heritage, and the challenges of changing food systems all of which disproportionally affect Indigenous communities. They will use community-based research to undertake place-based studies, and projects in partnership with institutions in 57 Indigenous communities and eight international hubs in the U.S., Canada, Atarau in New Zealand and Australia. The center's team of over 50 scientists, including more than 30 of the world's leading Indigenous natural environment and social sciences representing Native American first nations, native Hawaii, Alaskan native, aboriginal Australian people. We will work cross culturally -- they will work cross culturally -- not we - they will work cross culturally, involving indigenous communities and scientific researchers.

Again, I am so excited to listen in and be a part of this discussion today. I will now turn it over to Dr. Woods for his presentation.    

Cedric: Thank you so much. I am very much honored to be here with all of you in this virtual space and to engage in what I truly hope is a conversation and dialogue as my dear colleague Sonya and I talk about work at our institutions and at institutions writ large around this project.

I am going to attempt to share my screen to get the PowerPoint started -- And there we are. Hopefully you can still  see and hear me. And engage with me.

Today, we are talking about a topic that is timely for a whole host of reasons. First and foremost, land acknowledgements are becoming popular or increasingly popular, depending upon where you happen to be within the Commonwealth. It is a topic certainly worth discussing in an academic setting and in a human setting. 

Before we go any further, I want to let you all know where my home is located as well as my academic institution, UMass Boston. We are in the traditional homelands of the Massachusett people and work very closely with their contemporary successors of the Massachusetts tribe at Ponkapoag.

So when Sonya and I were talking about this particular presentation, we want to frame it certainly in a broader context, particularly given the international work that she will be doing in terms of looking at climate change and its impact on Indigenous peoples globally. This is not something that started in the United States. I know we frequently want to think that every innovative thing begins here, but we are very much taking cues, not necessarily Indigenous peoples themselves, but academic institutions, for what has been happening for a very long time within other context, international context. Whether we are looking at Canada or Australia, other Indigenous communities and academic institutions. 

And the land acknowledgements are, from my perspective very much the beginning of an attempt for internal dialogues about the forced dispossession and/or erasure of Indigenous communities in the nation states in which those academic institutions reside and where our individual universities are sited. It is not a one size fits all. Each academic institution has its own particular history that becomes part of this. It is a response for our institutions to demonstrate we can learn. We have seen what has happened in Canada as a result of the formalized truth and reconciliation commission of which land acknowledgements are but a very small part of that process to engage and understand what reconciliation means, what truth means. It very much is the beginning steps of developing the most critical piece of this, which is beyond the acknowledgement, and it is relationship building.  

Having said all that, from my perspective, both as an Indigenous person and scholar working in this field, they are necessary but by no means sufficient. To be meaningful, they must involve and ground a relationship with the Indigenous communities for whom and about whom the land acknowledgement is reflecting. It cannot be something that proceeds the relationship but should emerge out of a reciprocal respect for relationship building process.  

In other words, land acknowledgements, minus Indigenous engagement at the start is performative at best and can actually be harmful to communities when they are issued without Indigenous engagement and consent. Going all the way back to the title screen, beyond acknowledgements, the emphasis should be on the relationship, foregrounding what the land acknowledgement ultimately becomes. 

Now, full transparency, my university is in this process now. We are having these conversations with the Massachusett people and their representatives and we have been developing programming and physical representation in response to Massachusett community views and perspectives -- so this dialogue is not just about meetings, it is also about action. It's about reflections of Indigenous peoples in university hall, one of our academic buildings dedicated to performance and we commissioned a dance performance piece, which is on a continual loop and includes incenters and geographic space and homelands on waters of the Massachusett people as well as a Massachusetts community member as part of that performance space in that video clip production. It is also about representing and making Indigenous peoples welcome on our campus by other art such as a mural that is in our dorms, again, representing a traditional dwelling of many Indigenous peoples, not just in this region, and not just Massachusett, but the inside of a wetu.

At present, in the next week we will be doing our Indigenous Boston Harbor tours, which centers the voice of Massachusett community members and leaders using our boat and boat dock. As you can tell from my backdrop, we are very fortunate to be located on Boston harbor, which is also part of the rich story and millennia old history of Massachusett and also Nipmuc people with the forced internment at Deer Island. Those stories are also shared.

Whether we are talking native faculty, staff like myself, Indigenous students, allies working in native studies and administrators, we are all involved in this much broader, iterative process and conversation of dialogue, to get to the point when we have an appropriate acknowledgement that recognizes the original peoples who were stewards, contemporary collaborators and partners of where my university is situated and also accurately reflect our responsibility and ongoing relationship with them.

Now, I'm going to turn this over to my dear colleague, Professor Atalay.

Sonya: Miigwech. Thank you, Cedric, for that. Aanii Boozhoo. I greet you in my Indigenous language - in Ojibwe or Anishinaabemowin. It's our protocol, our way to introduce ourselves in our language, so I shared with you my spirit name that was dreamed and given to me as well as my tribal affiliation and also my clan - I'm Waabizheshi or Pine Marten clan.

I will speak a little bit about our process that we have gone through at UMass Amherst. Before doing so, I want to acknowledge where I'm sitting today. It's such a beautiful day. I was able to sit outside on my deck here. Hopefully my chickens leave us alone and don't hop up behind us as they like to do.

I'm on a traditional homelands of the Pocumtuc peoples, and I want to just think about them for a moment and acknowledge both the Pocumtuc peoples, the Norrwutuck and Nonotuck peoples, of these places where we, I now live and call home and their relations to the east, to the south, to the west, and to the north.

First a little bit about Indigenous protocols. As you heard when I introduced myself, we have a lot of kind of protocols that just as in western institutions, there are protocols. So in that protocol, I introduce myself and share certain things about myself -- that's all about relationality, connecting who I am, how I identify to other people and to places. It is the same thing, there are long traditions of Indigenous peoples globally of recognizing having a protocol that recognizes the homelands of other peoples when we visit those places. Those protocols look different for different native nations and different Indigenous peoples but there have long been those protocols - for millennia - of having ways to recognize and say, I recognize whose lands I'm on. I recognize I'm a guest in your homelands.

Although this process is more formal, it's about truth and reconciliation as Cedric was speaking about. There's a long tradition we have had of that acknowledgement. Here at UMass Amherst, this process of developing our campus land acknowledgement actually came out of a Mellon Native American and Indigenous studies grant that was written within the five colleges that were part of UMass Amherst. The idea was to begin with as Cedric said, relationships. Relationalty needs to be at the center of this work. That involved inviting conversation with respected leaders in the native nations whose homelands we are on here in the state of Massachusetts. We invited leaders from those native nations. I worked with the UMass Native Advisory Council, which I will talk more about, to be part of this process. We really just reached out, invited people to come together to have conversation, to talk about what mattered to them, to talk about the kinds of relationships we could develop between UMass Amherst and their communities.

I mentioned the Native Advisory Council. A little bit about that -- UMass Amherst has what we call the Native Advisory Council -- that includes members, folks across campus. That's by design. We do not think native issues should be centered in one place. They need to be woven and braided throughout the entire institution and throughout the entire, hopefully the whole UMass system.

On that Native Advisory Council, we have members from state and federally recognized native nations in Massachusetts. We have people from the admissions office, from the office of equity and inclusion, we have faculty members. We are really trying to think about how can we get folks from across the entire institution to come together and think about native issues.  

In this case, people from the UMass Native Advisory Council along with respected leaders and native nations, we came together and we had conversations. We started very simply with an undergrad graduate from UMass, who helped us coordinate. That was also by design. We are always training graduate and undergraduate students in these ways of working with Native American communities. That's just as important as the kind of academic or typical -- what you might of as the typical, intellectual work that students get trained in here. That they are trained to build their capacity to do this sort of work of developing relationships and working in a good way with native nations.  

We really just planned a series of conversations. We had several questions that we worked to develop to send out before those conversations took place. A lot of that was happening over, during COVID. So we did it over Zoom. We also invited the leaders who we -- who were coming to have these conversations with us to contribute their thoughts. Part of what we did there was we just said what are your concerns beyond the land acknowledgement. What would you like the relationship to look like? That seemed really important for us. It was also very important that we worked with people who are recognized, recognize leaders within native nations, not just individuals who happen to be native but people who have recognized positions or recognized leaders in those communities.  

I want to say, just briefly, in terms of thinking about -- I do a lot of work as you heard in the introduction in community-based participatory research, which really just means research that is coming from communities. In that, we often talk about capacity building. We talk about capacity building. It's often thought of as capacity building for research in Native communities. But I just urge you to also think about, in terms of what we are talking about today, that universities and institutions need to increase their capacity to build relationships and to learn in partnership with native nations.  

As Cedric said, there is some learning that needs to be done. Our example, we felt like we were doing that learning with and from each other. We were learning together. As I said, we had multiple conversations. And through that, we wanted to not just draft a land acknowledgement, but to think about what kind of concerns, what was next, what's next? Going beyond just the land acknowledgement.

And I listed here some of the key things that came up. Things like a real concern for native students on campus, for recruitment of native students and support of native students and what that looks like. Things like research partnerships were very important. That's part of where CBIKS came from -- our Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science -- The idea we could develop research partnerships that involved native nations in the state.  

In terms of the native student recruitment and support, one of the key things that we talked a lot about was having tuition waivers for native students. There are a lot of models we were asked to and we did do some research on those. The University of Michigan is one that is familiar to me. The University of Maine has a great model. The University of California system has just developed a model for what that could look like. That was a key thing that we started talking about and thinking of and I would just encourage people to think about, while you are developing the land acknowledgement, what else could come beyond that.

We talked about Indigenous pedagogy. What does it look like to incorporate ways, Indigenous ways of teaching and learning on our campuses so that there are a lot of ways of learning modalities. What do Indigenous ways of teaching and learning look like? How can we implement those, making sure we are not being extractive, in ways that are respectful for Indigenous knowledge systems.

We talked about developing things like a Traditional Teaching Lodge on campus, which we are now able to think about and we are in the process of doing as part of our Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. That's a place, as Cedric was talking about, a large wigwam almost like what you might think of as a long house, but a very large space where we can do place-based teaching and learning and beyond the land, really connected to the ground, the actual land we are on here.

Other things we talked about were a Native American Tribal Liaison, someone whose role it would be to think very carefully for how to further develop these relationships. Not that it is only that person's responsibility to do that work but really so that there is someone who is actively thinking about it and helping to facilitate those relationships and grow those networks across institutions.  

One of the things before I go to the next slide is to mention this can be burdensome in some ways for native nations to have to repeat and duplicate this process that we are talking about for every single campus. While I completely agree with what Cedric said, which is every institution is unique, it cannot be a one size fits all -- that is so essential. We can think about some things that could be done centrally for all the campuses, thinking about, for example, the tuition waiver or having a Native Advisory Council that helps inform the entire UMass system, or Tribal Liaison who can work with the whole UMass system so that, just thinking of what is helpful and useful for native communities, so we are not asking them to serve on multiple, you know, councils and do a lot of extra work. Just asking that we think about and be thoughtful as we move forward in building those sorts of relationships.

Next slide, please.    

Some of what came out of our work, I mentioned the Native Advisory Council that we have at UMass Amherst that meets regularly, discusses everything from repatriation to several policies they developed that I am going to speak about, thinking about research partnerships, how to support students, a whole range and anything that has to do with native issues. The advisory council is involved in decision making and weighing in on that. Also moving beyond land acknowledgement, a very important piece is being sure that we are in compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It's a federal law. All institutions are required to be in compliance with that policy. But not all institutions across the nation are. It does take a lot of work and a lot of relationship building to make sure that Native American ancestral remains are appropriately returned. At UMass, this is a big part of our commitment beyond land acknowledgement, was to think about -- making sure that we are returning all ancestral remains that are held in the institution, making sure, certainly, immediately that all -- that there is no teaching or research being done on Native American remains.  

We also developed a policy for bringing any new ancestral remains to campus so that there would be a process of review if there was a request to bring any new Native American remains to campus. That could be, even if a native community wanted to have some sort of research done that can potentially happen, but regardless, there needed to be a policy in place. UMass developed that policy.  As I said, we have actively worked to return all Native American ancestral remains and we are working on the ongoing identification of remains, other Indigenous remains, to ensure that they can be returned as well. 

We also worked to develop a Smudging Policy so that students who are here and faculty and staff and anyone on campus can engage in the practice of smudging. That may seem like a small thing to do but for native people, the practice of smudging, which is burning certain plants often sage or cedar, sweet grass, that kind of a policy is not immediate in all places. It was important for us to be able to not just have a policy, but make sure that students could do that in their dorms. I, as a faculty member can smudge my office every day and that the sprinklers aren't going to go off in our offices. That takes a lot of logistics and work to make it happen. It was an important policy that we worked on and put into place.    

One final other policy is the cultural tobacco use policy. So, at UMass Amherst, we have a policy about not using or having tobacco on campus. That contradicts the cultural use that many native peoples have of tobacco. So, for example, we use tobacco for gatherings. We will often say a prayer or blessing with tobacco. Not necessarily smoking tobacco but holding the tobacco in your hand.

Until we had this policy, we weren't allowed to do that. It contradicted the UMass tobacco policy. These sorts of things are really important in terms of insuring that there's a good relationship with native nations, that native community members feel welcome when they come to the campus, that students are able to engage in their cultural practices comfortably and staff and faculty can do that on campus. This is just an important part of beginning with the land acknowledgement but then thinking beyond that. I wanted to share those examples.

I think we have asked to have links to those policies in the chat so you can also look at those policies.  

Next slide.  

I think I'll turn it back to you, to my colleague Cedric.

Cedric: Thank you so much, Sonya for sharing all of that. Again, we are not all at the same place. There is a continuum occurring. I agree 100% with what Sonya references in terms of how can we share this learning across our campuses and within our system. We are sister institutions and just as we are learning from our academic Indigenous colleagues from Canada in the process they have gone through, we absolutely should be excited to share what has worked and also share what hasn't worked and what we can do better next time. That is really what I hope the conversation today is all about, about thinking about where do we go from here. We all have to start from somewhere and we can all grow and this can be a journey we can make easier for one another, for those who have moved farther along in this trajectory like our sister institution at UMass Amherst and all the hard work Sonya and other colleagues have done as a result of the Mellon Grant.

Again, each university has its own particular history. UMass Amherst and MIT, for example, are tied in with the Morrel Act, and the particular legacy of the federal legislation. My campus doesn't have that particular burden. But we can see Deer Island and Long Island from our campus. That also carries reality of geographic proximity to prisoner of war camps for Indigenous peoples during Metacom's Rebellion. The City of Boston also maintained the Indian Exclusion Imprisonment Act from 1675 to 2004.

Another thing to think about and to consider about how welcome Indigenous peoples feel within our greater metropolitan area given the history of these particular places.

Last, but not least, I contend that a state education institution with a mandate to educate the residents of the state and do the best that we can by them, we have a moral and legal mandate to engage in this kind of work to be the best partners and collaborators that we can with Indigenous communities.  

I'm going to stop sharing now. I know you have a variety of ways to ask questions or to engage with us. I'm going to welcome that into this space at this point in time.

[No audio as Cedric pauses for questions].

Mike: We do not have any questions in the chat, yet. If anyone would like to post one or raise your hand to ask.

[No audio as Mike pauses for questions].

Cedric: I actually have one I'm going to ask of all the participants. What campuses are you from?

[Cedric pauses as he waits for answers to come in].

Andrew: There's a lot of us from the President's Office, from the system office online.

Mike: Amherst. We have one Dartmouth, and Lowell. Another Dartmouth. It's a good spread. Mostly President's Office.

[No audio as Mike pauses to watch responses].

Cedric: I see my friend Jules from UMass Medical School. They are very closely and directly engaged with our dear friends from Nipmuc communities there.

[No audio as Cedric pauses].

Thank you all, again so much for coming. I really appreciate this opportunity to be part of this conversation. Sonya, thank you, again. I know you are busier than I am. For making time today to participate and share all the hard work you have done there.

Sonya: I'm happy to be here. Thanks to you, Cedric for sharing what you have worked on and what you are thinking about there. One of the things I thought I would kind of follow up on, as people are thinking about any questions or comments, is the point you made about UMass Amherst and MIT both being land grant institutions. This is something, if you look at the UMass land acknowledgement, that actually came up during our conversations that I referenced. It was important we felt, through that work, that we recognize those native nations whose homelands were seized and sold in order to establish UMass Amherst.

We didn't do detailed work on every institution. We know that work needs to be done. That's more work that does need to be carried out.

You will see in our land acknowledgement, we talk about those peoples at least listed in the records probably less than 82 native nations. There were 82 lists of individual native nations whose homelands were seized and sold as part of the Morrell Act for land grant so that UMass Amherst could be founded. There's a thought about what kind of relationships we could develop with those native nations, many of whom are west of the Mississippi, though there are some in the south as well. Not just thinking native nations here in Massachusetts, but also those other native nations across the U.S. and what obligations and relationships we can develop with them.

[No audio as Sonya pauses].

Cedric: Sonya, I want to pick up on that -- not in relation with the Morrell Act specifically. The Indigenous community in the Commonwealth is vast and extremely diverse. In metro-Boston area, there are thousands of first nation's people. Primarily, Mi'kmaq, but also some Maliseet, many Haudenosaunee people, here within the area that I call home. Many of them are my colleagues, students, fellow staff here within UMass Boston and then also in the New Bedford area. There is a very large, very vibrant community. With many of those individuals in that community, the older generation, Kʼicheʼ is their first language, their mother tongue and it is still spoken  within those homes.

When we think Indigenous peoples in terms of land acknowledgement, it's absolutely those communities, those native nations, Indigenous here, but when we think about the great beauty of diversity of Indigenous communities at our institutions, it is very broad.

Yes, Candyce.

Mike: Sorry, Deb has her hand up first.    

Débora: Hello everyone. Thank you to both of you for this important and critical presentation you gave. I just wanted to see if you could share more in terms of are there programs on each of your campuses right now that focus on recruitment of Indigenous students as well as Indigenous faculty or even staff, faculty and staff. We know that obviously inclusivity is extremely important as well as retention and having others that look like us is very important. Are there things currently happening in Boston and at Amherst?    

Cedric: Sure. Thanks, Deb. That's an excellent question. I do have a colleague who works with me. He is my native youth program manager, youth including young adults who become college students. That is very much his job. He has decades of experience in working in roles with young adults. He is a basketball coach, an educator running trio programs at Haskell Indian Nations University, but born and raised here in greater Boston. 

That is an initiative we have going now on our campus. Last week we just opened up a native resource hub in our campus center. We also hosted the first, to my knowledge, summit on native health in the Commonwealth. Co-sponsored by UMass Boston, the Department of Public Health, and having many tribal leaders as well as representatives from Indian health services to talk about challenges, resilience and opportunities here.

Those are the kind of things, Deb, that are happening. We have an open Indigenous studies position within our Department of Anthropology and we also have an open position in the school for the environment. We are hoping to find someone who focuses on and specializes in traditional ecological knowledge. I am hoping those are opportunities where we can expand our representation of faculty who work collaboratively in a good way with Indigenous communities and may also be from Indigenous communities themselves.  

Those are active initiatives we have. I have had a program going with our Bureau of Substance Addiction Services for the last decade. I have a community advisory board that meets every two week. I like to say we are the most representative group that meets most frequently of native communities in the Commonwealth. I haven't run across anybody that can contradict that.

That's what we are doing on my campus at present.

Debora: Thank you.    

Sonya: Thanks, Deb for the question. One of the great things I have learned a lot about -- Admissions, through when I was on the Native Advisory Council -- now I am really focused on this center -- but was working with admissions, and Michael Drish from the UMass Amherst campus, I have to do a shoutout to him and his office. They have been so helpful and committed. They have been coming to the Native Advisory Council meetings and doing a lot of work to try to learn what they can do in order to help increase admissions and outreach to native communities thinking about maybe what can we do in terms of programming prior to the college years.

Then thinking about, as I said, funding and tuition waivers. I think that is so important. We hear over and over again how important that is. Just a reminder, we are not talking about thousands of students. I wish we were. I hope we will be. For now, we are talking about small numbers of students.

So, Mike Drish, and thinking about admissions has been fantastic.

In terms of recruitment of faculty and staff, we are certainly thinking about that, working on that, thinking about how we can build across the campus through maybe developing native and Indigenous studies further in the five colleges. That's a really great way we are thinking about attracting more native faculty and certainly now that we have the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, we are thinking about and will be funding K-12 Indigenous science camps and after school programs all the way up through undergrad, funding for undergrads to do research in the center, graduate students, post docs. We are thinking about how to get students prepared and working with students before they are at that college age. I'm really excited we will have that opportunity through this center.    

Debora: Thank you. I'm so happy to hear about the pathways, creating those pathways, because those are so key and important to get students from Massachusetts and beyond. Thank you.

Mike: Candyce, if you want to go, then two questions in the chat.

Candyce: Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and give us this information. I was wondering, starting with the Nef's welcome, about what land I'm on and is there a web page we could go to so each of us could find whose land we live on?

[No audio as Sonya and Cedric consider Candyce's question].

Sonya: I can say a little about that. There are some. There are apps and web pages. That's a good start. It's a start. I don't have one handy, but I could -- I could work on finding one and getting that to you. Sometimes they are not all that accurate. Right? Just be aware of that. 

It's a starting point. It's a good place to start to think about whose homelands you are on and then reading some of that history. Unfortunately, when you look up, there's a great book called "Firsting and Lasting" by Jean O'Brien. What she talks about in that book and I have my students read it, is that oftentimes native people are erased. When you look up a particular town you live in, what you begin reading about is how that town was founded on a certain date and it's always the European foundation. More and more, you are starting to get that earlier history. There were indeed people here and they are still here. We are on someone's homelands. Those places are a good place to start. But, then, do further research.    

Cedric: I just encourage you too reach out to the Mass Commission on Indian Affairs. At the end of the day, they have a statewide obligation to advocate support for Native peoples within the Commonwealth. They also deal directly with the tribes who are here now as well as those who were removed because that is also part of the state's history in relation to repatriation, quote unquote, and I hate the term but it is part of the reality of the framework Sonya and I work with quote, unquote, culturally unaffiliated -- ancestors as well.

So Mass Commission on Indian Affairs should be one of your first stops in terms of having that conversation.

Candyce: Thank you.

[A pause in conversation].

Mike: Then, Maria posted that she enjoys connecting to cultural experiences through food, music, and language. How could someone find and interact with the taste or sounds of the Indigenous communities, specifically in the Amherst area?

Cedric: The Amherst area, I'm going to leave to Sonya, but, in general, in the Commonwealth, go to a pow wow.

[Cedric chuckles].  

They are happening practically every weekend. The Mass Center for Native American Awareness has the best regional pow wow directory you can find anywhere. I will see if I can find the link for their events page and drop that into the chat.    

Sonya: Great suggestion to go to local pow wows. I put a link there as well to Ohketeau, which is here in western mass. Rhonda Anderson is heading that up, and there's just amazing things if you go to their website that you can see -- events that you can attend and a lot of learning that you can do.

[A pause between speakers].

Mike: Thanks. We also have a question, it referenced a memorial to the great swamp fight in Rhode Island that's kind of hidden and falling apart a little bit. The question was, what can we do as a system to provide memorials to those tribes impacted by colonial wars?    

Cedric: Great question. I'd always say start with the tribal community before you develop a plan to do anything with any of those memorials. I think I am aware of the one you are referencing. And it is my understanding the Narragansett Indian tribe just recently received control of that site. It is a very significant place for them and for their community and for any other communities in Massachusetts. I give the same advice -- start with them and see what kind of partnership they may or may not be interested in. The response may be thanks, but no thanks. That's okay, too. There are many other things we can partner with native communities on.

Sonya: I agree with Cedric. Thanks for that. You know, always think about Tribal Nations as nations and thinking about working with their identified leadership rather than just individuals, a native person you might know. I even feel uncomfortable as just a faculty member. I always say, go to native nations. Think about partnerships with native nations where you are at and that's really a good place to begin.

I will mention that in addition to the written land acknowledgement, we developed at UMass which you can see online and that's spoken at events and that we teach and work with students on, we are also working to develop a marker of sorts, a place -- we have worked with a native artist to develop a beautiful, beautiful sculpture that will go in the center of campus and identified a place for that so that students and faculty, anyone on campus who is walking in, walking past campus will see that marker and will have information about whose homelands they are on. 

It's just another educational piece we are working on for the campus to help educate and let people know. They may not look on the website but they may pass by the central area of campus every single day. That's another piece that -- and again as Cedric said, developing that with native nations.

[A pause in audio between speakers].

Mike: Alright. We have another question. Have other campuses developed similar policies to the ones that Sonya talked about at Amherst?  

[Pause as speakers think about question.

Cedric: I will say that when the tobacco use policy was being discussed and ultimately developed and promulgated at UMass Boston, we had the exact same conversation, Sonya, that possession of tobacco is not a violation of the policy. There's burning tobacco, which is a different thing, but there is also religious exemptions built into ours as well.

I will have to talk to you separately about how you are able to get the ability and green light to smudge indoors. We have not been that successful, yet, with that, but it is something I still want to continue to pursue.

Sonya: I can share a little about that. We developed a process and we worked with our facilities people. Again, having that Native Advisory Council that has, you know, a web, a network across the whole campus. What I was trying to avoid was that it is a few people who know about native issues. That it is, you know, the diversity and inclusion office. It's only there. Certainly it's there but should be woven into everything across the whole campus.

So, our facilities folks have been great. We have a process by which you fill out a form, say when and where the event is going to happen. There is even signage that we provide that you can put up in the area. There's a -- you submit the form and the facilities folks know so they are able to adjust the sensitivity of smoke alarms and sprinklers and things like that.

Happy to talk to you more about that, Cedric. I would love to know if other campuses are developing these kind of policies as well. 

One thing I also wanted to go back to is just this piece because I saw it somewhere in the chat -- the piece talking about pipeline and more students, the undergrads and before the K-12. One of the things I wanted to share that we learned as part of our research for CBIKS, the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, my colleague, Ora Marek-Martinez, of Northern Arizona University, did some research to look at -- because we are dealing with sciences and STEM, just looking at the number, where we are with native students in STEM fields.

It was shocking, startling, extremely troubling what Ora Marek-Martinez was able to find. Which is, over the last ten years, STEM degrees for every single ethnic racial group has increased, at different rates, but all STEM fields for all these groups has increased except for Native Americans. For Native Americans in the last ten years, STEM degrees decreased, not just a small amount, but 17%.

So, you know, what can we do? That is a big part of what we are trying to do with this center, is think about making sure that Indigenous science is something that is recognized by K-12 students that these are valid ways of knowing, they are important ways of knowing. They help us solve major problems we have such as climate change. That starts very early. That's why we are thinking about these Indigenous science after school camps and after school programs, week long science camps to try to address this issue of disparity in terms of STEM. It is not just STEM; it is other fields as well.

Cedric: I want to pick up on that as well, Sonya. In addition to STEM, the unfortunate reality is in a decade from now, there will be fewer people like Sonya and I with PhDs in academia. That number is also decreasing. It is not a new trend; it is an ongoing trend. It begs the question, what can a system like ours do to counteract? What can we do to grow Indigenous academics here with ties with their community, whose way of life is informed from these understandings of being Indigenous person and bringing that to the classroom as well. 

We are working on the other end of that pipeline. We successfully graduated two cohorts of native teachers in early childhood education with funding from the Office of Indian Education, but there's so much more that needs to be done. We don't have to compete for it. There's so much work that needs to be done. We all need to focus on what we do best and do well and collaborate with one another.

[No audio as speakers pause].

Mike: Thanks. At this point, there aren't any other questions. Jules, I know you have put a few items that Chan has done in the chat. Do you want to talk about any of those for a minute?    

Jules: Sure. Sure. About a year and a half or two years ago, we started an advisory council with our local Hassanamisco Nipmuc people and we developed our land acknowledgement in cooperation with them and then we are also have speaker panel series and we also have just got approval for an art exhibit that we will talk about the lands that our campus is on in addition to having the artwork displayed prominently in the Medical School.    

Cedric: I will also give a shoutout to Chan, Jules, you have two native PhD students both from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe in your nursing program. They work with me under my BSAS funded effort for prevention programs for native youth in the Commonwealth and also around the state opioid response grant funded projects.

[No audio as speakers pause].

Mike: Thanks. I would like to thank everyone, especially Professors Atalay and Woods for a wonderful discussion today. On a personal note, hearing Sonya speak her native language was really special I think that is the first time I have heard Indigenous language spoken outside of the movies. I also want to thank Nefertiti Walker for introducing Professors Atalay and Woods at the beginning of the event.

A special thanks to everyone on the event committee that helped plan the event - Candyce Carragher, Kristina England, Débora Ferreira, Kerri Hudzikiewicz, Jacquie Kittler, Chaya Mallavaram, Maria McKinney, and Cheryl Millett.

Just a reminder to everyone, an event survey will be sent out this afternoon. Please complete that and feel free to provide us with ideas for future DEIA events. And also stay tuned for two exciting upcoming DEIA events. We have a virtual Veterans Day Program and an in person Diwali Celebration that I'm very much looking forward to.

Thank you very much, everyone.