Muñoz, S. (Host). (2021, Oct. 11). Moving beyond land acknowledgements (No. 64) [Audio podcast episode]. In Student Affairs NOW. https://studentaffairsnow.com/beyond-land-acknowledgments2/

Heather Shea:

Hello everyone, thanks for tuning into this special re-release of one of our first episodes, Moving Beyond Land Acknowledgements. I’m one of the hosts and founders of Student Affairs Now, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she her hers. 

Today’s special bonus episode in recognition of Indigenous people’s day is sponsored by Colorado State Online Colorado State University Online is now offering a fully online Master of Science in Student Affairs. This program will help you gain the professional competencies, knowledge, and experience to succeed as a higher education administrator. You will earn the same master’s degree and learn from the same faculty as CSU’s on-campus students. Learn more at online.colostate.edu. 

As I mentioned, today, Monday October 11, is Indigenous People’s day. A Few days ago, President Biden issued a proclamation:

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our Nation celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government’s trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.

I believe in addition, administrators on college and university campuses have a specific and important responsibility to recognize and honor the relationships with the indigenous peoples on whose land their campus resides. On my own campus, Michigan State University, has embarked upon a movement tied to our 2030 strategic plan to collectively recognize and acknowledge the connection between land-grant universities and the systematic seizure and dispossession of land from Native Americans as well as the role the federal government’s support for agriculture played in relentless westward expansion. 

The land Michigan State’s main campus occupies was ceded by Indigenous people in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. These lands are the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. Land granted to benefit Michigan State in association with the Morrill Act was situated in both the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan, ceded in the 1819 treaty and two treaties in 1836. 

Today’s bonus episode features Dr. Susana Munoz with Dr. Heather Shotton, Tiffany Kelly, and Shelly Lowe, discussing how colleges and universities can move beyond land acknowledgments. They provide questions for student affairs leaders to consider as more higher education institutions adopt land acknowledgements as a common practice. 

We hope you benefit from this rebroadcast of “Moving Beyond Land Acknowledgements. Thanks for watching!

Susana Muñoz:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’M your host Susana Muñoz. Today we’re talking about land acknowledgements on college campuses and how higher education institutions can perhaps move beyond these statements . I’M thrilled to be joined by three Indigenous scholars and practitioners in the field of higher education. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find us at studentaffairsnow.com or on twitter at @stuaffairsnow! As I mentioned, I am your host Susana Muñoz. I am an Associate Professor and Program Chair in the Higher Education Leadership program at Colorado State University. My pronouns are she/her/hers/ella. I’M hosting this conversation today from Fort Collins, Colorado with respect, I want to acknowledge that the land I am standing on today is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and peoples Now let’s get started with this conversation. We’re here to discuss land acknowledgements on college campuses. Why are these statement’s important, but how can institutions move beyond these statements? I have my guests here today that I’m super happy about. So please introduce yourselves and your relationship to the topic. Yes,

Tiffani Kelly:
Halito, Hello everyone. My name is Tiffany Kelly. My pronouns are she her and hers. I’m a citizen of the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma and I am currently working at Colorado state university. Also, I serve as the assistant director in the Native American cultural center here. And I also serve as a co-chair for the Native American advisory council to the president, which is doing is a newer advisory council, which is doing a lot of the Indigenizing Indigenous work at Colorado state where our land acknowledgement was created by Indigenous and Native faculty, staff and community members. So have been doing this work for a couple of years now. And then I also am involved with NASPA serving as a co chair of the Indigenous people’s knowledge community, where we are also doing some of this work within NASPA and really having conversations about centering invisible, Indigenous and Native student affairs professionals. So I’m also just a little more about me. I’m a first generation student and I’m, multi-racial,

Tiffani Kelly:
I’m a sister, I’m a daughter, I’m an auntie and I’m truly excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Shelly C. Lowe:
Navajo Translation: Hello my relatives and my fellow Navajos.  My name is Shelly Lowe.  I am white born for the Black Streaked Red Running into the Water clan.  My maternal grandfather is white and my paternal grandfather is Edgewater clan.  I am from Ganado.  My name is Shelly Lowe. I am a citizen of the Navajo nation. I live and work on the traditional territory of the Massachusetts tribe. I’m the executive director of the Harvard university Native American program. I’m in this position. Actually we are currently working on our kind of creating an institutional territory land acknowledgement. And it’s a, it’s a process. I think that takes many forms and has many perspectives. And it’s going to be, I think in this case, a long process, I can talk about some of that a little bit because it, but it’s a process that’s ongoing. So there are some things that we just haven’t gotten to yet that this institution.

Shelly C. Lowe:
So my office and my role is to support kind of spearheading that project and trying to have all of the voices involved that need to be involved and the perspectives that need to be taken into account in that process. I am originally from Arizona. I’ve been out here for 11 years. I am a mother. I am a grandmother, I, my daughter and a cousin and auntie and I miss home. I miss home a lot. So it’s nice to, it’s nice to be out here where the seasons change, but it’s hard, especially at this time to be so far away from individuals that you can’t, you can’t easily go home and see right now. So, but I’m glad to be here.

Heather Shotton:
Kiowa Language: Haun day ohn day aim bohn! (It’s good to see you). I am  Heather Shotton and I am an associate professor and the chair of for the department of educational leadership and policy studies in the, you know, at the university of Oklahoma, I also serve as the director of Indigenous education initiatives for the Janine re Rainbolt college of education at OU. I reside and call home to these are my homelands. But I engage with work scholarship, practice teaching and learning on the traditional homelands of the Wichita Caddo people. I also recognize that what is now known as Oklahoma originally served as a site of gathering exchange and migration for a number of tribes, including the Kiowa, the Comanche, the Apache, and the Osage, and that today 39 tribal nations call Oklahoma home many as a result of settler colonial policies over removal. So I think that that’s an important acknowledgement

Heather Shotton:
In terms of the work that I engage with and where I am and acknowledging the responsibilities to the tribal nations in this state. I am a citizen of the Wichita affiliated tribes. I’m also a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendant and like my, my lovely co guests, I guess today I am a mother, a partner, I’m a daughter, a granddaughter and an auntie and a sister. So I’m glad to be in community with all of you today. Some of this extends to the work that I’ve been doing at my own institution but also the work that many of us have engaged with the association for the study of higher education. So that’s what brings me to this conversation today. I’ve been fortunate to be a part of a group, a collective of Indigenous scholars. Who’ve engaged ASHE with really developing land acknowledgement practices and sensibilities over the last two years. So I’m so happy to be in community with everyone today.

Susana Muñoz:
Thank you for those beautiful introductions. I’m so thrilled that you bring your authentic selves and all of your identities and languages into this space. That’s a treat. I’m grateful for that. So I’m gonna start off with, with Tiffany. Tiffany, could you give us some historical context and, and, or even institutional context about land acknowledgements on our college campuses? You know, what, what do they accomplish, what are some shortcomings and just your overall work with land acknowledgements

Tiffani Kelly:
Thanks, Dr. Munoz. Yeah, I think I, I looked up a couple of resources, but I think there’s some really good scholarship and literature out there about land acknowledgements now. And I think, you know, in my experience in higher education land acknowledgments have really become kind of a trendy thing in the last, just couple of years by non-Indigenous folks. And I think it’s important also to note that as Indigenous Native folks, we’ve been doing our own forms of land acknowledgements for a very long time in very personal and community based ways. And then other folks institutions started to maybe pick up on some of the language and I think in all honesty kind of capitalizing on some of the maybe good PR that it brings out, you know? So I do first want to acknowledge this article that was recently published by Megan red shirt, Shaw beyond the land acknowledgement.

Tiffani Kelly:
And she writes that an a land acknowledgement and Indigenous land or territorial acknowledgement is a statement that recognizes the Indigenous peoples who have been dispossessed from the homelands and territories upon which an institution was built and occupies and operates in. And I think that’s really important and she goes on to write more about it that colleges and universities wouldn’t exist without stolen land and without the dispossession and settler colonial ways of removing and dispossessing Native and Indigenous communities. And so while land acknowledgements have become kind of a welcome or a way to kick off an event or a graduation which is great. And I think really does help visualize our communities in ways that are often very invisibilized and hidden and not talked about in institutions of higher education and even in like diversity and inclusion work. It feels very one off and, and like a checkmark kind of a thing, especially I think as it’s become a little more trendy and his colleges and universities are just creating statements to read without additional institutionalized policies and programs that are helping Native and Indigenous students that are helping faculty and staff and giving them resources and opportunities and things like that.

Tiffani Kelly:
And so I think it’s, I think in terms of like accomplishments and something that I’ve been really fortunate to be a part of the work at Colorado state university is it, CSU are kind of weird acknowledgement. And our advisory council was really created as a taskforce to respond to a racial bias incident on campus against Native students. That was really publicly it was very public and it went public very fast. And so it kind of mobilized CSU to create this task force and out of this task force and a lot of work by Native and Indigenous faculty and staff and community members and students, the language and the land acknowledgement was created. And it’s a very like public forward facing thing. So I think folks really think that it’s kind of a one off and I think that’s good to question, but I also think it’s given us some leverage and some capital to push some other initiatives and really questioned policies and practices that CSU as a land grant institution should have been thinking about a long time ago and really since the beginning.

Tiffani Kelly:
And so I think some of those accomplishments and some of the things that it does that it’s done at least at CSU and in my experience is it’s, it’s created some, some institutionalized scholarships and award money for Native students. So recognizing students that are citizens of tribes that are outside, that were forcibly removed from the state of Colorado to be able to receive in-state tuition which is a good step, but I think we could push a little further. But also, you know, it’s created some, I think, visible and maybe talked about issues that we’ve been talking about as a community for a long time that were just never really central to conversations when talking about student success and retention and diversity and inclusion work. And so I think it’s been a great first step. But I think some of the shortcomings, and I’m sure this is gonna continue to come up is that for folks that really don’t understand or really have never learned about Indigenous communities and Native history and laws and policies, because those things aren’t taught in our K to 12 education, really, especially depending on where you went to school.

Tiffani Kelly:
It’s, I think it’s misunderstood a lot and I’ve experienced that at CSU quite a bit that people feel like great. This is a part of our welcome and we’ve read it and now I’m going to go into logistics of the programs like here’s where the bathrooms are, and then I’m going to do an actual welcome. So it feels like very tasky and it’s just red. And it’s, you can feel when someone doesn’t maybe understand what their role is in the land acknowledgement, which is something we talk about a lot. And I, I kinda joke about it. I’m like, right. I think land acknowledgements are really for non Native and Indigenous folks. Cause if we were really having these conversations, you’d be giving us our land back or we’d be providing free tuition or something for students. And so like, what is your role in understanding your, your positionality to this land?

Tiffani Kelly:
And even as a Native person, I’m a settler here because my tribe, my people are not of this land. And so even what is my role in this work? And I’m pushing further beyond land acknowledgement, which the title of the podcast. So you know, I think something, I think about a lot and something that I’ve been grateful to have some conversations around within NASPA, my Indigenous people’s knowledge community group is really talking about like, what is indigenizing? What does indigenizing mean? Because it’s getting thrown around a lot. And there’s a a quote in this book, Power in and Place by, Vine Doloria Jr. and Dr. Dan Wildcat that really stuck with me. And, and they write about that to indigenize an action or an object is the act of making something of place and really understanding what is place and what is our relationship and role to that place. And so I think those are the conversations that were able to have now because of this. And the land acknowledgement has kind of positioned us to do that and really ask some of these harder questions and assets of our colleagues, Navarro administrators, and our students. And so those are just some of the things I’ve had experience with at CSU and kind of maybe in some other institutions. And I think it’s, I think we’re in a place it’s pretty

Tiffani Kelly:
Common now. And so I think it positions us to really ask some harder questions, like, all right, we’ve got the lovely statement. We made a pretty video now, what now? What are we doing? What else are we doing? Right? How are we creating positions? What relationships are rebuilding, what the tribal nations in our state, we’re the ones that were pushed out of this state in order to further this work. So those were some of my thoughts and things I was thinking of.

Heather Shotton:
Yeah, Susana. I actually really appreciate starting with that question of where, what is the context, particularly the historical context of land acknowledgement statements or land acknowledgements. And so when Tiffany talks about these are things that are connect to traditional practices of Indigenous peoples, I think that’s really important to understand because it’s about our connection to place and land, not just connection and whose land we’re on.

Heather Shotton:
But what is our responsibility and how are we in relationship with, and I think Eve Tuck had a really great I’m not sure how we start citingTwitter. Like it was a great tweet a number of years ago when NAEC was scheduled to be in Toronto that really pushed back on this idea of land acknowledgements and reframing it as acknowledgement of land and how we’re in right relationship with land and place and water. Right. I think the other historical piece is in the U.S. Context, much of what we picked up in institutions that we’re, we’re framing as land acknowledgements were adopted from first nations and from Canada and came out of our response to the truth and reconciliation commission in Canada, that address first nations people and the atrocities of settler colonialism, and that first nations people have endured.

Heather Shotton:
And so land acknowledgements in that context, we saw that really happen in Canada first. And then we started to adopt a lot of those. But I think the, the question of going back to what are the origins of this and understanding why we do something is always a really important first place to start from so that everything that Tiffani’s talking about, we avoid the checkmark mentality, the, okay, you have 35 seconds to give your land acknowledgement statement before you present your paper at this conference or whatever that, you know, it might be. And or can you give me a boiler plate? Like what is the land acknowledgement statement that we all have to read? So if we’re all starting from a position of understanding why we do them, what is their historical context and framing it of acknowledgement of land and place and our relationship, then it shifts, shifts away from, from some of those missteps. Alright, go ahead Shelly?

Shelly Lowe:
I also said I would, I wouldn’t even to kind of respond to both Heather and Tiffany

Shelly Lowe:
Kind of this idea, give me the bullet boiler plate. Right. I can’t tell you how often my office gets emails and calls about. Can you please tell us what to do for a land acknowledgement? Can you please come over and do the land acknowledgement for us? Can you please tell us a Native person who could do the land acknowledgement for us? And the reality is that’s not supposed to be by a Native person, right? It’s supposed to be by you, whoever’s opening your event. Doesn’t matter who it is. You’re supposed to do it. My favorite one was, can you come over and we can record you so we can play it at the beginning of all of our programs? No, that’s not how it works. But I like the, I like Tiffani and kind of talking about how do we ground ourselves in place, right.

Shelly Lowe:
Place being more than just a place, but also land. And I think the, the reality is we do this really well. In student affairs. We do this every single day as we come into our jobs, we ground ourselves within a certain place within the institution within a certain role, right. We know what our job is. We know what it is, where we belong. And trust me, if, if we think we over overstep our bounds of where we belong, somebody will tell us somebody not in student affairs or academics or something will tell us that we’ve overstepped our bounds. Right. We’re very good about knowing where we sit within an institution where our physical office space is, you know, how is it accessible to students? And I think, you know, it’s, it’s a it’s it’s about taking that a step further, right.

Shelly Lowe:
And understanding, okay. Our physical office, our physical institution, where does it sit? You know, geographically, where does it sit within a region? Where does it sit? You know, when I look outside, what are the trees that I see? What’s the environment what’s out there because it’s going to look different for me than it’s going to look for other individuals who are in other parts of the country. And if we could just kind of start to think about that a little bit more, then hopefully we start to think even further, right? Who are the people that were here at are here, who are the people that were originally here. And that becomes part of a more understanding historical knowledge of the place and knowledge of the land that you’re in, which I think we should all be able to do and why people don’t actually take that extra step to that point. I’m not really sure why that doesn’t happen. And that’s one of the things I think that we’re grappling with here and the institution that I’m in.

Heather Shotton:
That’s actually my favorite response. Whenever they ask them, can you come give the land acknowledgement for me? Well, I don’t know y’all are in my homelands. So the land acknowledgement that I’m going to provide is very different than what you’re going to provide as a settler, because I literally work on and engage with scholarship and teaching and learning on my traditional

Heather Shotton:
Homelands. So what I have to say is very different than what a settler has to say and what that responsibility and relationship is.

Susana Muñoz:
So yeah, I always say, well, I don’t know you’re on my lane.

Tiffani Kelly:
And so I don’t know what to tell you,

Susana Muñoz:
Appreciate the conversation because I feel like you’re right. We, we have not engaged in sort of what is our relationship? What is my individual relationship to the land, to the water? How have I reconciled

Susana Muñoz:
You know, how I navigate in these spaces? And I think, you know, what it lacks is sort of like this constant engagement you’re given the statement. You’re like, okay, here you go. But it’s not engaged in, in ways that really unpack our individual relationship to the land. And so

Susana Muñoz:
I wanted to ask Shelly sort of you’re, you’re at, you know, you’re at Harvard you know, which is you know, regarded as one of the colonial institutions. And I wondered if you could speak a little bit to sort of the institutional reconciliation

Susana Muñoz:
And for Indigenous college students. And what does that look like in practice?

Shelly Lowe:
I think, you know, to kind of lay the groundwork of Harvard as an institution. As many people know Harvard was founded in 1636 and by 1650, the institution was not doing well. It was actually didn’t have enough money and the society for the propagation of the gospel raised money for the institution in order to educate and house Native students. So in 1650, the Indian college was built. The charter was, was the charter was created an Indian college was planned to be built the charter, which we it’s kind of our document today. What we kind of adhere to is to educate English, English, and Indian youth of this country. And it’s very interesting, it’s a long charter. So that’s just kind of a very small portion of the charter, but it’s the portion that, you know, gets used the most.

Shelly Lowe:
And in ironically, in some instances, the Indian youth part gets taken out with.dot, dot, dot dot, which we’ve had to call out a number of times here at the institution. But, you know, it’s part of, it’s a charter that we try to remind people of every day, because at Harvard, I can’t tell you how many people don’t actually know that history don’t even know the history of the institution. And I’m talking about students, I’m talking about faculty, I’m talking about administration. So it’s difficult to kind of look at Harvard as an example because of its founding because of its history. But to say that the reality is most people don’t know that that’s the history that that’s what the institution is. Harvard is not a public state institution. Harvard is not a land grant institution. So some of the, that public and land grant institutions are having are not the conversations that Harvard is having.

Shelly Lowe:
Harvard is also one of the prime examples of a decentralized institution. So Harvard’s one institution, Harvard university, but it’s made up of a number of different schools that actually kind of run themselves as though they’re separate colleges and separate institutions. So the Kennedy school could make a decision about territorial acknowledgement or Indigenous people’s day on their calendar. And the ed school can do something completely different. So Harvard university, as a whole allows the schools to be able to make their own decisions and kind of govern themselves and decide what their calendars are gonna look like or how they’re gonna do some of these kind of decision making and practices that they might adopt schoolwide. So it’s kind of, it’s an interesting time to try to say to an institution, all right, everybody needs to think about our history. And everybody needs to think about the fact that we have Indigenous and Native students here when every school is kind of thinking on their own and doing their own thing and having different relationships with tribes and having different kind of focus and curriculum that’s Indigenous in nature.

Shelly Lowe:
But what we find is our students come in and our students are kind of confronted with this from the get go, like from day one. They are very aware that this institution doesn’t know its own history once they find out, cause they don’t always know when they get here. And then they find out what the history of the institution is. They find out that very few people even know that Natives still exist in this institution and in the area generally. And that they are one of, maybe two other students at the school that they’re at. Hopefully there’s a few more, there are a couple of schools that have more than, you know, a handful of Native students and they start to feel that kind of sadness, right, that this institution really is. So for all of its knowledge and glory, I’m really clueless about something that’s so important to them and about their identity, about where they come from, about the reality of where they live, what Indigenous cultures are about, what Indigenous knowledge and studies about.

Shelly Lowe:
And we find that students get, they start to come together and they start to have conversations with each other. And if there is something that has actually happened here at Harvard, in terms of institutional change, acknowledging Indigenous people’s day, in certain instances or faculty giving land acknowledgements at the beginning of events, a lot of it has come from students coming together and petitioning or writing letters to the deans and to their schools and making this public through, you know, the student newspaper or being interviewed through the Harvard Gazette, right. Our students really do. They, they have a voice and they tell the institution quite point, blankly, you know, this is wrong and you to change this. How does the institution respond to that? You know, depends on the school and depends on the individual who’s kind of being of the school or the faculty in that school.

Shelly Lowe:
I do think that over the past couple of years, we’re seeing a lot more faculty paying attention. They’re actually asking questions. They’re actually realizing that this is the history and they’re going about trying to find information to share about that history. They’re including it in their coursework, but it’s just, it’s a start and for an institution that’s so old and has this, his has had this history for so long, you know, sometimes it’s really shocking that we’re just now getting to that point. And we’re just now being able to really kind of say to a student who comes in, Oh, the university now does, or the school and the school and the school recognizes Indigenous people’s day. Although Harvard general calendar will say, you know, Columbus day as a federal holiday Indigenous people’s day is a Cambridge city holiday, right. You’re still going to be confronted with that.

Shelly Lowe:
Kind of just smack in your face, which students are, you know, very upset about, but they’re going to events and they’re hearing land acknowledgements. We have institutions on campus that are putting up signs in their buildings with land acknowledgements. And it’s, it’s starting to be a conversation regularly across campus, but it’s not something that the institution has adopted kind of university-wide right. And that’s the conversation that we’re trying to push forward now, how do you create something that is university-wide because we see so many great examples from other institutions, right. And everybody’s always trying to look at Harvard as the example, and we have to be honest and say, yeah, you know, we haven’t gotten there yet. We’re working on it. It’s, it’s a conversation that, you know, our allies are, are really having to be pushing forward for us. We’re such a small voice in terms of Natives on campus.

Shelly Lowe:
We tenured the first Native faculty member in 2018. First time Harvard’s ever had a tenured Native faculty member. And, you know, so it’s small steps, but these little things are starting to move the conversation forward. And the institution I think is actually starting to pay attention a little bit more and be much more supportive, but it’s, it’s been a long road and it’s frustrating and it’s extremely frustrating for our students. And we just, we just gotta keep going. Right. You just gotta keep that conversation front and center and keep reminding the institution that this needs to happen.

Susana Muñoz:
Thank you for that. Yes. I think I had a, let out a big sigh when you said 2018 was the first time you tenure to an Indigenous faculty that’s and it’s, it is work. It is just, you know, continued steps and, and, you know, one of the things that we continue to notice is that it’s the students labor that are continually pushing on these issues to our administration. And, and so Heather, like, you know, how should our colleges and universities be operating in relationship, you know, to the land that we currently operate in and, you know, what, you know, what should we be thinking and asking and questioning, you know, our universities to be doing.

Heather Shotton:
well, first of all, I have to acknowledge, I love that Shelley is always like y’all need to quit looking to Harvard as the epitome with all the answers.

Heather Shotton:
I love her honesty about that, because I think that that’s really important when we think about how we, how, what institutions we look to in, are we really thinking about what they’re getting right. And what they’re not like the fact that 2018. Wow. and, and for those, you know, for higher ed scholars and practitioners that know the, the deep history of, of those institutions. So yeah, I just needed to acknowledge that because I love it. And she, she’s pretty vocal about that in lots of spaces. So to her credit. So when, you know, I think about this question of then how should we be our institutions be operating in relationship with land that they, that they currently occupy. And one, I think is understanding that the context so Tristan Autumn did this really great series on land grab universities and and has provided and has done a podcast episode on it.

Heather Shotton:
And lots of writing about our land grant institutions and how many of our institutions don’t question where that land came from or what that means and how they continue to benefit from occupying Indigenous land. And so I think that that’s the, the, that’s the minimal step of, of thinking about how you’re in relationship with land is understanding what, what your relationship is and what the historical context is. How does your occupation of that land impact Indigenous peoples? How has that dispossessed tribal nations, how has that impacted Indigenous communities? How does it continue to impact Indigenous community? So I think it’s, it’s that’s like the, that’s not even a step, like that’s the starting point that, that our institutions have to start from. And so I think that even, you know, the question to Shelley about thinking about institutional reconciliation, so Colorado state is a great example of recognizing how the benefits from the dispossession of land for the original inhabitants of that area.

Heather Shotton:
Right. So reconciling that with tuition waivers, for descendants of those tribes and what that, what that looks like that’s that’s, I think a, a great first step and a great example. I think that, you know, it’s not just the recognition of land and not just the recognition of the people of that place. But it is certainly about understanding and becoming familiar with, and being in relationship with those people understanding that I think some people talk about who were the original inhabitants, but they talk about Indigenous folks as if our physical removal and sometimes, and oftentimes very violent removal from these lands and these places. We noticed when I was introducing myself, I talked about the 39 tribes that now reside within Oklahoma. The majority of those tribes are not Indigenous to this place but were violently removed here or forced forcibly removed here.

Heather Shotton:
And so I think recognizing that even though tribes may have been removed to another location, that doesn’t remove our connection to those lands in those places. Right. So when we talk about Indigenous peoples who historically, or traditionally had ties to those lands, it erases the, the connection that we keep with our ancestral homelands, right. And you know, our sister scholar Charlotte Davidson often talks about the umbilical connection that we have to land into place. And so I think understanding those things when we think about institutions and their relationship to the land that they occupy again, understanding the role of, of settler colonialism, what is the role of settler colonialism and how does the institution continue to benefit from that? So that means understanding how how we think about land, how we conceptualize land. So from an Indigenous perspective, we’re thinking about it in terms of, of relationship and land as a relative, and what are our responsibilities from a colonial perspective it’s perceived as dominion and how we own land, land is property.

Heather Shotton:
And so really interrogating how institutions even approach approach our understanding of land, right. And, and what that relationship is. I mean, we see it all the time. If you look at any agenda for your Regents or your trustees, and there’s always some discussion of property of institutional property. And and so that’s an important piece. I think the other thing is when we think about at what points are the mission and the work of the institution in congruent or in conflict, or do they contradict land acknowledgements or relationships with land? So I think I have a couple examples and those that were at the the session that many of us did on landing beyond lane acknowledge that statements at Ash last year. We talked explicitly some of our fellow Indigenous scholars from Hawaii talked about the direct impact of research scientific research at UAH Manoa and and Mount of Kia.

Heather Shotton:
So the desecration of a sacred mountain and site and place for for Native Hawaiian people that’s a direct connection to the institution that is in conflict. So what good does it do if you acknowledge what land you’re on, if you are actively engaged in production of knowledge or research that impacts Indigenous people in negative ways, or that destroys land bases and continues to undo places and sacred sites and knowledge of Indigenous people. So what good does that do? If you can read all the land acknowledgement statements you want, but if you’re still engaging in harmful practices, what does it matter? And I think about my own institution in a lesser way. I think Monica and you know, a lot of attention has been given to that over the last couple of years, but particularly last year.

Heather Shotton:
And so it was at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds and really agregious but we see this often in our institutions, I think about my own where our mascot literally celebrates theft of Indigenous land. If we understand the, the, the context and the history of of where our mascot comes from at the university of Oklahoma. And let me just note, this is where tenure is a really great thing as I speak out and say these things that, that might not be viewed very favorably, but I mean, we, what does, so we’ve actually been working at the university with a group of us on developing, not just a land acknowledgement statement, but practices and protocols for the university, but I struggle because what good does any of that do if if every, I have to look at a celebration, the constant celebration of dispossession of Indigenous land, we celebrate it every day.

Heather Shotton:
We celebrated it football games when we reenact the land run. And so if we are not changing our practices and being accountable to Indigenous peoples of that place, then then what is the point? So I think about thinking about what are the actual responsibilities to try relations to Indigenous communities, and more importantly, what are our responsibilities to land and to place. So how do we think shift our thinking away from dominion and ownership and property and how much land we can accumulate to framing it within being caretakers and being a good relatives to land, how are we in good relationship with land and how are we making sure that that work that we do in our institutions, one doesn’t recreate harm, but two also is continuing work that it helps us to be in a right relationship thing. Eve Tuck talks a lot about that. How am I in right relationship with, and making sure that it’s not only that we’re not recreating harm, but that we are responsible to upholding upholding sovereignty upholding treaty rights and upholding the Indigenous peoples of the land and being good relatives to land and place.

Susana Muñoz:
Oh, yes, that was good. And that was, that was, that was it’s a lot, it, it it’s, you know, looking at continually looking at how our institutions are perpetuating whiteness, white supremacy, settler colonialism, but also understanding that it’s, it’s super rooted in our practices. And so it, you know, it’s, to me, I think it’s like, you know, this, this this in congruency is, is way more important than sort of like looking at yes. How are we? Yes, yes. How are we in relationship to the land and what continues to be an incongruence in our practice and in our policies within our institutions that sort of contradicts this, this, thithe notion of an acknowledgement that the relationship I know we’re getting near our end of time and I, I want to just ask you all sort of, you know, this podcast is called student affairs now. So what are you now pondering questioning troubling? You know, based on some of the conversations that we’ve had today, I’m going to start with you Tiffani.

Tiffani Kelly:
Yeah. I, I mean, I jotted down a lot of notes cause I’m definitely like mulling over as soon as there’s practitioner, like, what is our role in student affairs to really like push the agenda and help our institutions do some of this work. And I keep going back to something that Shelley Shelley, when you talked about the tenured faculty being in 2018, and I, I wrote down like our land acknowledgements, like misleading and like bad marketing, because it’s like false marketing. Like we have these land acknowledgements to, to like make our institutions look like where, you know, what the buzzwords anti-racist, inclusion and things like that. And then our students get here, our faculty and staff get to those campuses and are looking at a racist mascot every day, or there’s nothing put in place to actually support those communities. They’re not upholding treaty rights or acknowledging sovereignty or building relationships with tribal nations.

Tiffani Kelly:
And so I think are really sitting with like institutions, you know, in particular student affairs folks, it’s thinking about land acknowledgement is something you’re wanting to do. And you’re just tapping into the only Native or Indigenous person, you know, on that college campus to really like, look and think about how you’re perpetuating those settler, colonial logics of the eraser of Native people and only wanting us for token, whatever, you know, what policies and practices are actually being advocated for and brought forward to, to be talked about, you know, the land acknowledgements really are just like, they seem easy. And I think folks are creating and adapting language very easily without doing some of that harder work, but what else are you doing? And I think that’s a lot of what everyone brought up today and really like, it’s like, if you think this is easy, then you better be ready to do the rest of the work that comes along with it.

Tiffani Kelly:
And I don’t know if folks really understand like what all that extra and additional work is and should be. And, and so, yeah, I think I’m just sitting with some of that of, of like, what are those conversations looking like? And also that can’t just live in student affairs. Like we don’t have the capacity to do those things. And are often the one asked to do those things like Shelly and Heather, you were talking to right. Being like the Native office, like getting asked to do all the things that’s like. We’re trying to take care of our students over here on crisis right now because of everything happening, but sure. Let me come speak for 25 seconds at the beginning of your thing. So now I’m rambling, but those were some of the like notes that I jotted down of just like, this is really hard work and it’s heart work that really comes down to relationships and, and really looking at policies and practices and evaluating like how your institution continues to benefit off of the genocidal practices against and Indigenous communities.

Tiffani Kelly:
And those aren’t fun conversations. So I think it requires a lot of commitment and accountability and responsibility on the part of institutions and the folks working there to be a good relative like Heather was saying. So,

Susana Muñoz:
Thank you.

Susana Muñoz:
Yeah. Shelly, how about you?

New Speaker:
I have to say that I ponder and I, every day I have the things in my head around, like, I just don’t understand why is this happening? I don’t get it. So there’s like a whole list of things that I could go through. A couple of things. I think as student affairs professionals, the, one of the best things that we can do is we can have the resources to give to our students who are being put in these situations, whether they like it or not. Some of our students willingly go into the situations to try to address, you know, the issues of nobody understanding Native cultures that Natives exist. But some of our students are not wanting to do that. And they’re kind of being put in that position without their permission. So we do our best to make sure that the resources and, you know the protections that we can give them when they have to go into these conversations, when they have to play this role that they haven’t asked for and being there to support them and making sure that they know that we’re there and we’re going to continue the work that they do because students, you know, when they’re in our institutions, they don’t understand that they’re transient in our institutions, right?

Shelly Lowe:
They’re not gonna be here forever. They’re gonna go and they’re going to have to do it in a different place as they leave our institutions. But I ponder everyday. I just don’t understand how a student can graduate from an institution of higher education in this country, without understanding that Native people are contemporary, that we exist, that we are enduring and we’re going, we’re not going anywhere that we have real cultures that we have living cultures, living languages, that we have sovereignty that we are Native nations. You know, it just, I’m just shocked by the extremely talented intelligent people who graduate from our institutions and don’t know that still they go out into the world to do these jobs. They go out to make all, you know, in leadership positions to make all of these changes, but they are not aware of the fact that Native people are real, that we exist, that we are part of this country, that we are part of this world that we have been here and we will continue to be here. It just, it I’m just shocked every day when somebody comes up to me, I didn’t know, Native people still exist high school teachers. That just, I don’t know. So what I ponder is, you know, and I say this a lot, too many people have no idea what they don’t even know. And how do we

Shelly Lowe:
Change that? How do we as institutions of higher learning, how do we as professionals and student affairs, right? How do we help our institutions to address that issue? Without, you know putting all of the burden on, like Tiffani said, two or three people, right? Staff in the Native studies program, our staff in the Native student support office, right. We need our allies and individuals to help us do all of this work. And building that coalition, I think is it’s part of our jobs that we need to make sure that the right people are in with us, because we know that when we do this work at the wrong person’s in it really derails things. And it takes things off in a different direction that we needed to go. But, you know, it’s, it’s going to be something that is starting now, but I think it’s something that we’re going to continue to talk about in 10, 20 years, unfortunately.

Heather Shotton:
All right. I’ll keep it short. So I think that really what I’m, I’m continuing to grapple with, and I, and I hope that others grapple with is that all of these conversations around land acknowledgement practices around land and responsibility in relationship really around decolonizing work is a process. It’s not a destination that we, and when we frame it as a destination that’s when we get to the checklist that we have arrived. And I think if what I have I continue to grapple with is then what does that ongoing process and how do I engage this as an ongoing process of responsibility and reciprocity and approach it from from that place and, and through that lens. And so that my hope is that across our institutions in student affairs and academic affairs at every level that then we’re being good good community members with one another and grappling with these questions together and encouraging one another to think about this as, again, a process and not a destination so that we’re removing that kind of expertise. And the notion that we have nothing yet to learn the land is always teaching us, right. We’re always learning. And so as long as we center ourselves and from that place, I think that that it opens up possibility and opportunity for us to engage in the work that we do in higher ed in much more humane and responsible ways.

Susana Muñoz:
Thank you so much for that. And, you know, I love that you all brought in, certainly this is a process and that the coalition building needs to be there and that you know, it has the moving beyond the, the land acknowledgements require that we, we do some critical reflection in our leadership. And I think that’s, that’s, I appreciate all the knowledge that you’ve brought in today. I’m grateful that the time that you gave today as a guest and student affairs now you can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to student affairs now, newsletter or browsing our archives, that student affairs.com, please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share on social media or leave a five star review. It really helps the conversation like this, reach more people and build community. So we can get to you to make this read to you again, I’m Susana Munoz. Thanks again for our fabulous guests today and to everyone who’s watching and listening be kind to yourself and make it a great week. Thank you.