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ELAINE WESTBROOKS: Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Elaine Westbrooks. I'm the Carl A. Kroch University librarian. And I'm pleased to welcome you this afternoon to this panel discussion, Indigenous Perspectives in Higher Education, Reflecting on the Past to Inform the Future, which is part of our opening celebration for the exhibition Redressing Histories of Early Haudenosaunee Women at Cornell, 1914 to 1942.
Special events, like our panel discussion and exhibition tonight, help to celebrate and honor essential but often overlooked voices that have shaped and continue to shape history at Cornell and beyond. With their dedication and expertise, I'm exceptionally proud of our librarians, curators, archivists, and the researchers, and scholars who collaborate to document the past to make sense of the present to build a better future.
I'm happy to see all of you here. And I'm especially thankful for our guest exhibition curator, Lynda Xepoleas, class of '23. I also want to acknowledge Eileen Keating for her work and all the speakers on the panel to my right, your left.
I'd also like to acknowledge that our Cornell trustee, Leslie Wheelock, class of '84-- I don't see her in the audience. She is planning to attend, but I definitely wanted to acknowledge her.
I also wanted to acknowledge Daniel Guilfoyle, the grandson of Henrietta Hoag Guilfoyle, who was the first Haudenosaunee woman to graduate from the College of Home Economics, now known as the College of Human Ecology.
As you know, it's Human Ecology Centennial Year, and our events tonight are part of its celebrations. So now I'd like to invite Rachel Dunifon, Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Dean of the College of Human Ecology, to tell us more about the Centennial celebrations and to introduce our panel. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
RACHEL DUNIFON: Thanks, Elaine. It is great to see so many people here for this fantastic event and to be part of celebrating our 100th birthday with us in the College of Human Ecology. We're really focused on celebrating our very proud past, learning from our past and reflecting on it and taking all of that knowledge to take us forward into the next 100 years of the College of Human Ecology. We'll be having an actual birthday party on our birth date, which is February 24, but we're celebrating this entire year and focused on learning more and deepening our own understanding of our College and its really exciting history.
So this work that you're going to be seeing today is really the result of some fantastic work that Lynda Xepoleas did a couple of summers ago, when she was a Dean's Graduate Fellow in the College of Human Ecology, diving into the archives here with the partnership of our famous Eileen Keating and really digging in there to help us learn about and tell our own story in the College of Human Ecology. And through Lynda's explorations, we learned a lot more about some incredibly important figures in our College, including Henrietta Hoag Guilfoyle, who, as Elaine mentioned, was the first Haudenosaunee woman to graduate from the College of Human Ecology.
And we're so honored to have her grandson, Daniel, here with us, her granddaughter, Kate, and Kate's husband, Charles, with us today. And we'll be doing some special celebrations after this. We'll also be unveiling a nice poster featuring Henrietta and the impact she's had here at Cornell.
Henrietta, as we'll learn, was one of five Haudenosaunee women who came to Cornell through a scholarship and the only one to graduate, which hints at some of the challenges she and others faced in the context, the very painful context, not just only of that time but that still endures today. So today, we'll have a lot more opportunity to learn about that from our amazing panelists, who will be talking about Indigenous perspectives in higher education broadly, building off of what Lynda learned in her amazing dig into the archives here.
So I want to thank our panelists for sharing their expertise. I want to thank the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program for their support, the Cornell University Library for their putting on this wonderful exhibit and opening event. And I really want to thank Lynda for her entrepreneurial work, digging into this amazing resource that we have here to help bring Henrietta's story and so many other stories to light.
Lynda is now-- she's moved on from us at Cornell. She is now very excited that she's an Assistant Professor in the School of Fashion Design and Merchandising at Kent State University. As an ally fashion scholar, Lynda's work continues to contribute to discussions on decoloniality, inclusivity and antiracism in fashion research and practice. And I'm so excited to invite Lynda up now. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: Well, Thank you, Dean Dunifon, for the introduction, and thank you to everyone for being here today. As she said, my name is Lynda May Xepoleas. And I'll be moderating today's panel on Indigenous Perspectives in Higher Education, reflecting on the past to inform the future.
But before I introduce the panel, I want to begin by acknowledging that the New York State College of Human Ecology and Cornell University are located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohó:no, the Cayuga Nation. The Gayogohó:no are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land.
The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogohó:no dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogohó:no peoples, past and present, to these lands and waters. And this land acknowledgment has been reviewed and approved by the traditional Gayogohó:no leadership.
And in addition to this land acknowledgment but separate from it, I, along with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies faculty, would like to emphasize that Cornell's founding was enabled through the course of a national genocide by the sale of almost 1 million acres of stolen Indian land under the Morrill Act of 1862. And to date, the University has neither officially acknowledged its complicity in this theft, nor has it offered any form of restitution to the hundreds of Native communities impacted.
Acknowledging place is important. After all, the catalysts for today's panel and associated exhibition was the release of an investigative report by High Country News on the land grant system in March of 2020. In the report, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone illustrate how the Morrill Act of 1862 transformed land expropriated from tribal nations and to seed money for higher education.
They identified Cornell as the largest benefactor, with Ezra Cornell acquiring almost 1 million acres of stolen land. As a graduate student enrolled within the New York State College of Human Ecology at the time, I myself began to contemplate the ways in which my own College was implicated within this history. In 2021, I received the College's Inaugural Graduate Student Summer Archival Research Fellowship, which really allowed me to conduct extensive archival research within the College's records.
And what I learned was that Cornell's home economists received federal, state, and private funding to develop educational programs for Haudenosaunee women prior to the College's founding in 1925. And this ranged anywhere from the dissemination of wartime food programs on the Onondaga Nation in 1916, to the development of a scholarship fund for Haudenosaunee women within the College of Home Economics in 1925.
Yet these women didn't just take part in the various educational programs Cornell offered during this period. They also directed and shaped how their cultural practices were represented and circulated within the college's curriculum and extension programming. Letters shared between Cornell faculty and members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the archives illustrate how, from the very beginning, Haudenosaunee women made space for themselves and their communities within the College and through Home Economics extension.
They specifically developed their own organizations and clubs that allowed them to share what information they wanted to disseminate within their communities and across campus. And I encourage you, if you want to learn more about early Haudenosaunee women at Cornell, that you attend the opening reception that follows this panel. It will immediately follow, and it's going to be out in the lobby of Mann Library.
But while the exhibition and the opening reception acknowledge and celebrate early Haudenosaunee women within the College, today's panel will examine current institutional practices and contexts that can better support the success, health, and well-being of Indigenous students today. And this is an especially important and timely topic, considering the recent drop in enrollment among Indigenous students at Cornell, as reported by the Cornell Daily Sun just a few days ago.
This afternoon will hear from three esteemed panelists who collectively work to mobilize Indigenous and intercultural knowledge within higher education. Our first speaker is Dr. Adam Hoffman. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Human Ecology.
He studies the development of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities and their implications for mental health and well-being among adolescents. His research spans a wide range of minoritized youth, including Native-American youth in the American South.
Our second speaker, Dr.-- excuse me-- Renata Leitao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design at Cornell University. She is a graphic designer and social justice-focused design researcher with extensive experience in participatory projects with Indigenous and local communities. At the helm of the Pluriversal Future of Design Lab, Dr. Leitao focuses on ontological design, delving into the interplay between the ideas humans hold about how the world works and the tangible experiences and environments we design.
And lastly, we have a Dr. Meredith Alberta Palmer. Dr. Palmer is a Tuscarora of Six Nations, and she's an Assistant Professor in the departments of Indigenous Studies and Geography at the University at Buffalo. She received her PhD and MPH from UC Berkeley and held a presidential postdoc here at Cornell from 2020 to 2023. She is a critical Indigenous geographer, researching technologies of colonial occupation and the refusal centered in Haudenosaunee country.
So just so you have an idea of the format for today, we'll have each of the speakers come up, give their presentation. And then if you want to hold any questions you have until the end, we'll have time for a discussion. And then after that, we'll have closing remarks.
And so for those of you online, we have somebody monitoring the chat. So if you just want to write down your questions, we'll make sure to address those once the discussion comes up. So without further ado, I'm going to invite Dr. Hoffman up to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]
ADAM HOFFMAN: I think I'm just going to grab this, and hopefully everyone can hear me because I like to walk and talk when I give a presentation. [LAUGHS] But Hi, I'm Dr. Adam Hoffman, and I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology here at Cornell. And I'm just so excited and grateful to be here today.
And what a great panel that we have. I mean, I just am so grateful to be with these people and among them and get to present this research because it's so near and dear to my heart, the things that we're talking about.
I'm going to be talking a little bit more of a contemporary perspective and psychological research. We don't like to think too much about history, though It's important that we do, obviously, especially for Indigenous populations. But I am going to be presenting more of a contemporary perspective about some of the issues and challenges that Indigenous youth experience. And I talk about this across education, from pre-K all the way up through higher education. A lot of these issues are issues that are pervasive and continue and have trickle down effects or trickle up effects all the way from those pre-K years up into when we're experiencing higher education.
I like to also say in positionality here, especially as I talk about a population that I'm not a part of, is that I'm not Indigenous. I'm a non-Native person. I'm a white person. But I'd just like to talk about that and mention that because I think it's important that we say that.
But I do like to bring Native voices into my presentations when I do talk about my work with Native American populations. And so I'm going to show a quick clip here of a video of Native youth talking about their experiences in education, in school today. So we're going to watch this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- It kind of sucks. It's kind of like playing dodgeball but getting hit every single time.
- All they teach us in school basically is who they were, where they lived, how they were killed, and how we stole land from the white people, basically.
- Administration is definitely a bit harsher on certain races.
- Teachers assume a lot about us. And they assume that we're druggies or we're alcoholics.
- That I'm a thug or something. And I'm not.
- When I do say I'm Native American to substitute teachers or teachers, they always ask about per capita checks.
- You shouldn't be here. Go back to your land. Go back home. It's kind of stupid because this is our land.
- But it's just the people that make it, that make you suffer to go in your school.
- Our teachers, they don't really help us with bullying.
- Makes your self-esteem so low to where you feel like you don't even want to get up and go to school.
- I think representation is very important, and seeing people who look like us in positions that matter.
- The school system should advocate more just say, hey, Native Americans are still alive. Don't be mean to them, and here's a few facts about them.
- We're just more than Natives. We're more than that. We're people. We have the same emotions. We have the same fights and stuff that you're probably going through. And we have to go through the same thing.
- If we really are able to understand that we are a Native people and we are all one, and we have to lift each other up.
- Music.
- I want to be a cosmetologist.
- I want to become an actress. But I don't see a lot of Native American actresses.
- Want to help out with my family when I get older.
- I want to become the first Native American male model to be known.
- I just want to see more.
- Basketball every day. It would be my dream to have a full scholarship.
- I really just want to learn. I want to see where it takes me. I want to be able to help other people. And of course, I always want to be able to come back to my-- where I came from and celebrate and all of that with other people.
[END PLAYBACK]
ADAM HOFFMAN: These kids have dreams and goals and aspirations for the future, but they also talked about a lot of the barriers that they're facing and experiencing-- literal discrimination, issues of feelings, of feeling like they belong. Bullying, they were talking about. And these are things that these kids are experiencing on a daily basis for these Native youth. And so it's important that we think about what are some of the challenges that these kids are experiencing and facing at this time.
Before we get to any further, though, I just want to talk a little bit about my experiences in working with Native communities and where I've been. I've worked with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And they're in Western North Carolina. They are in the western part of the state of North Carolina here.
And in Northern Georgia was their traditional ancestral homelands. And they're a federally recognized tribe that I worked with there. Most of the Cherokee Nation now, today, is actually in what was removed in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which was instituted by President Andrew Jackson, into the Indian Territory, which is now present-day Oklahoma, of course.
And that's why we see that the Cherokee Nation there is predominantly seated there. But these were the people that were able to stay behind. And so I was able to work with this community, in particular, for my dissertation research, to be able to learn more and understand about the community and be able to implement psychological research that could be helpful and beneficial. I did that through community-based participatory methods.
So I was able to work with this community. It took a long time. I lived on or near the reservation boundary for several years and did a lot of interviewing, just talking with people in the community to learn more about what are some of the needs that we see, especially in the education system.
I went to the schools. I went to the tribal school. I went to the two public schools that most Native students go to in this area and was talking with people, the community stakeholders, to say, what are you dealing with? What are some of the issues and how could psychological science be potentially helping with these issues?
And so I was able to develop an intervention around promoting STEM motivation. That's something that they wanted to have and have implemented. And we were able to do that. And so I was able to do that and a lot of really cool research.
It's a vibrant, thriving nation. Today, 16,000 people are enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And so it's just a really great opportunity that I had and then subsequently was able to do some really cool research and be able to really contribute to the science. Where Native Americans are so underrepresented in psychological science, to be able to offer that was really a rewarding and beneficial and actually something that I just had to brag about this.
This came out literally today, November 4, 2024. We had a special section in one of our top developmental journals today to highlight the Indigenous perspective in psychological science. So it was a huge win for us, and I was part of that co-editor board to be able to get that into the field, because, of course, there was such little representation in our top journals for Indigenous child development. And so we were able to do that.
So just a little plug there. But why is it important to talk about the education of Native Americans and especially today in the modern context? Well, we know it's important to understand there's unique psychological, social, and cultural aspects of education for Native American students. And those kids were talking about some of those things that they were experiencing that were unique to them, some of the forms of prejudice and discrimination that they were experiencing.
And so that's something that we need to be talking about, is that they're facing these things. And so we have to recognize and acknowledge that. We have to know that having conversations about these things is actually going to impact policy. If we're having these discussions like we're having in this room today, people will notice. And that could influence policymakers in saying, oh, this is something that people are actually talking about. We should pay attention to this.
There's a whole room of people gathered here to hear about these issues. This is something that's significant. So it's important that we're doing that, but also for our pedagogy. So finding ways that we can implement Native perspectives and Indigenous ways of knowing and ontogenies into our pedagogy is something that's also going to be important. And that's something that we can do here when we're talking about Native students and education.
And then finally, just talking about this for the general well-being of our communities, to recognize and acknowledge that these people are marginalized. And for those people who are marginalized, to be acknowledged in this way and say, hey, we've got some issues that we're dealing with and this is something that needs to be addressed, and that's something that's important that a community feels that they're being heard in that way.
And then finally, just to acknowledge again the historic marginalization and ongoing educational disparities, because I'm going to highlight a few of them for you today in my talk. But it's important that we're having that discussion and acknowledging and recognizing there's some things out there. I'm also going to talk about some assets that we know that kids have from our research that can actually help benefit these kids in mitigating some of these disparities that we see.
So first, I'm just going to talk a little bit about some of the challenges that Native students can face in education. And of course, I have to go to a historical perspective first and foremost, because that's where it started, in the education of Native Americans in the United States. And so I'm going to have to talk about the horrific past that we have around boarding schools.
And that's where it started. At the very beginning of education, Western education for Native Americans in the United States was in the boarding schools. And so for those folks who don't know, these are basically just forced government relocation for long-term boarding schools for kids. So they were forced to go to these places, removing them from their families and their tribal way of life.
This was something that they had to do and were forced to do. And oftentimes or sometimes they were coerced, but sometimes they were just forced to have their children go to these boarding schools. And oftentimes the kind of underlying mantra or ideas that were pervasive in these schools at the time was this quote that many probably have heard of here, but is called "Kill the Indian and save the man."
And this is just destroying Native culture by removing the culture, stripping these children of their culture and cultural ways and stigmatizing their culture so that way they would try to reject it, then, in that way. And so we see that they were teaching children that their own culture and language were inferior or problematic, wasn't as good as the Western way.
In these schools, clothing and belongings were taken away from them, especially those that were of significance and that were culturally relevant. And they were given Western clothing and hairstyles, especially for those boys. They would be cutting their hair, which of course, has sacred value to many Native communities out there.
So they also used excessive forms of abuse for speaking the Native language or practicing spiritual beliefs. And this was things like physical beatings. They would engage in starvation and psychological and sexual abuse as well.
This happened in the United States and Canada. There was about 408 schools alone in the United States. And this was what was called the boarding-school era, which happened from 1860s all the way up until the 1970s. So it was quite a range, quite a long time that some of these schools were actually happening and being implemented even up until just 50 years ago in the 1970s.
They oftentimes had to engage in forced manual labor. So this is just beyond like they had to go have their educational experiences, but beyond that, they had to engage in heavy and difficult physical labor that they had to engage in after their school hours to be able to live there and be there. Oftentimes there were non-compliant children, not understandably so.
They're in horrific, terrible conditions and being taken away from their families. And so there were non-compliant children. Some were allowed to go home, but oftentimes many just escaped or tried to run away, while others just were killed or committed suicide. So these were awful, horrific, terrible places. And this was the start of Western education for Native Americans in the United States.
So that's just the historical context that we have to start working with of understanding what are the educational experiences of Native Americans in the United States today. So, not surprisingly, when we think about today, we think about the fact that there's historical trauma around education. And that's been passed down over generations.
So for those who don't know, historical trauma is just trauma that's being passed down generation after generation. Has a trickle-down effect around these kinds of traumas that people experience because of Indigenous colonization in particular. We know that there's also just-- as that was mentioned and brought up in the video there, there's just heightened and significantly more increases or rates of experience and discrimination and stereotyping for our Native youth.
So they report higher levels, compared to other youth on these things. But also we have the use of mascots still. And we've seen a lot of improvement of mascots in communities and no longer using them, especially even at national levels, which is really great. But even still within communities, we still see that there are some schools that are using Native mascots as a form of discrimination and stereotyping that kids can have.
We also know in the research that there's been an increase in prevalence and understanding of microaggressions, micro-insults in particular for Native youth and the implications that that has for things like academic engagement and achievement. The more that they're experiencing this, the less likely they are to be engaged and want to do well in school.
And then clicking, but nothing's happening. So I turned it off? Maybe I did. OK, we're good. We do know, too, that there's high dropout rates. And this is actually more than any other ethnic racial minority group in the United States. We have the highest rates for our Native American youth in the United States.
So about 24% of Native American youth will drop out of school at some point. And we know that 65% of Native Americans do graduate from high school, compared to 82% of the US population. So a significant difference compared to the general population. And that is the lowest rate of ethnic racial minorities in the United States, again.
And then finally, when we think about higher education now, actually we're getting only 9.3% of Native American people actually earn a college degree, whereas when we compare that to the US population, about 35% of people get a degree in college. So significant differences, lots of disparities that we see in education.
And we see that this is also-- these are all individual effects coming from experiences of discrimination, the traumas that they've experienced. But there's also structural issues that are at play here, too, that we need to recognize.
In psychological science, we focus so much on the individual, but there's also structural factors that are absolutely going to be influencing the psychology of the individual. We think about underfunding and lack of resources in Native schools, especially those schools that are funded by the BIA.
Those schools are not good. And there's been consistently there's been reports that are reporting on high levels of asbestos, like poor access to internet. Oftentimes those that are especially on the reservations are in really rural remote locations where they don't have access. They can't even get good internet. It's not even an option.
So these schools are oftentimes very dilapidated, very poorly maintained, run. They're just not nice places to be. It's nice to be in a nice place, and you're more likely to learn and do well in a place that's nice. And the schools are not it.
There's a cultural mismatch, too, when we think about some of the structural issues. There's a cultural mismatch between educational practices, the Western perspective versus a more Indigenous perspective. We see that there's just not a congruence in some of the values that are considered important from a Western perspective to a Indigenous perspective.
Again, we see that high dropout rates. But then we're also going to talk about how kids and students come into school with mental health concerns. And we're seeing this at increasingly alarming rates, particularly among our Native American youth. They are consistently overrepresented in almost all developmental psychopathology that we see, particularly in mood disorders, but also even things like suicidality and PTSD.
So we see disproportionate rates here of mental health outcomes and substance abuse issues as well. And then finally, we have to think about the compounding effect of socioeconomic factors like poverty. And many Native Americans are overwhelmingly represented in lower socioeconomic status.
Because of that, then we see the limitations that having fewer resources are going to have on education, especially then access to quality. So even if parents want to get their kids to schools and education, to a school that might be a better school for them, that school, especially if again, they're living on a reservation, that could be hundreds of miles away and just not possible or feasible. Their only option is the reservation school that they can be on oftentimes.
And so this is just another limiting factor that we have in why we see some of these disparities in education for Native students. But I want to focus now on some of the positive, the assets that we have here from psychological science that we've found that can be helpful in these ways.
Again, a lot of these issues are structural in nature. But in psychological science, we know we can focus on at least some of these things, some of these personal aspects or assets that they have to be able to help, safeguard or mitigate from some of these issues that they could be encountering.
So first is just thinking about the curriculum. So having a Native American cultural perspective in our learning is something we can implement. And, y'all, this is not radical. We should, honestly, be doing a lot of these things anyway. They're probably best practices, but we're just not implementing them.
So I'll go through the list here, but they're really, honestly, straightforward. We should be doing a lot of these anyway. Having an emphasis on community-based, holistic, experiential learning, this is considered an Indigenous perspective. This isn't something that we do in a Western perspective, in curriculum, development, and learning, but totally is something that we should be doing. And this is actually something that we're doing when we shift and think about social and emotional learning practices.
And that's a huge, huge force that's coming through in our education today is teaching these kids, to be more of community based, to be thinking about other people, to be thinking about and engaging in experiential learning practices with other people. Thinking about the importance of storytelling traditions and also having spirituality. This is something that again, that could be easily implemented into our school system that would not be difficult, but is actually really important, especially for our Native youth.
Collective versus individual achievement. Again, we don't have to get rid of individual achievement altogether, but implementing some collective achievement as well and making sure that the whole is coming along and achieving and doing well in school, not just individuals and just leaving others behind when they get behind. That's what's going to be really important. And this is something, especially for our Native students, to make sure that they have this. But again, everyone is probably going to benefit from this.
And then finally, just thinking a little bit more about other kind of culturally relevant teaching practices. Specifically, I'm thinking about honoring Indigenous knowledge systems and ontogenies, especially when I think about this in higher education. We're all about empiricism, but there's lots of ways of knowing and being and understanding different things.
And this is something that we need to acknowledge and recognize, especially at a place of higher education where we claim to be so open-minded and knowing and all of these things. But yet we might be rejecting these other ideas and things that people may have and through their ways of knowing. So it's something that we need to be doing.
Place-based learning, so thinking about our location and understanding our location and our connection to nature within this location is something that, again, not radical. Something we should just be doing anyway, but it's going to be especially helpful for our Native students.
And then thinking here about cultural resilience and education, so what are some of these factors that we know from psychological science that can be helpful for especially Native youth in promoting education achievement for these kiddos? We know that role models' representation, as they mentioned in the video, is something that's going to be really important. Seeing someone, even the challenges that they experience-- that's an important part-- is going to be helpful for these kids to be able to be successful as they go through their educational experiences.
We also know about the importance of cultural pride and positive ethnic racial identity. So having a stronger, more positive sense of self on the basis of their ethnic racial group is going to be super important. And it's shown to be a buffer in the face of discrimination, prejudice that then is likely to have impacts on their academic achievement and motivation.
And then finally here, the role of family and community support. Not surprising. In many Native American cultures, family and community is something that is of paramount importance. So making sure that we have developed intervention programs that can help facilitate family and community support around education is something that's going to be really important for the future for Native youth and their success in education.
Just thinking now finally here towards equity and education for Native students, just some policy recommendations. We need to be funding our Native schools. So schools that are on reservations, those are especially that are funded by the BIA. Not all reservation schools are, but especially those that are funded by BIA need this.
Support for Native teachers. We need to be doing everything we can to get more Native teachers into the classrooms, especially at these reservation schools, so that way they can be part of their community, developing culturally relevant curriculum.
Also promoting psychological research that's addressing education and mental health issues. So that way when kids walk in the door, they're not thinking about the mental health issues and problems that they have. They can be there to learn. That's what's going to be important. That's what we need to mitigate through psychological science.
And then finally, building partnerships between Native communities and educational institutions. This is something that's so important. When we're engaging with any minoritized population, we need to be engaging with community-based participatory methods. We need to be working together to solve problems because we are only experts in the phenomena. We're not experts in the context necessarily. And so we need to be working with these community partners to be able to help us.
Now, they have their boots on the ground. They know what the issues are. And so this is something that's going to be really important that we do as we move forward. Finally, again, I like to center Native voices in my presentations. And this is a quote from Mandy Smoker Broaddus. She's a leader in Native & culturally responsive education in schools and communities.
And so I just want to end the presentation with a quote from her. She said improving the quality and access to Native American curriculum benefits all students. For non-Native students, it can lead to a greater awareness and compassion. But for Native students, it can teach strength and resiliency, foster positive identity development, and uphold tribal sovereignty.
It can support academic success, which can make a bigger impact in the near term and have ripple effects both at the individual and the community level. So thank you so much for listening to my presentation. I'm happy to take questions later.
[APPLAUSE]
RENATA LEITAO: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me to be here. Thank you so much, Adam, for the amazing presentation. I hope I can add a little bit more something else to the reflection. So my name is Renata Leitao. And I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Human Centered Design. And I am also affiliate faculty of American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
So I'm Brazilian and Canadian. And I'm a graphic designer, and I define myself as a social design researcher. And I've been at Cornell since 2021. I was hired with Adam in the cohort of Pathways to Social Justice. And I created the Pluriversal Futures Design Lab.
What is-- for me, what inspired my presentation today were more my four Indigenous PhD students. Understanding that Indigenous PhD students are a rarity, very few Indigenous people reach PhD, so a committee chair of two and committee member of other two, being two of them are Haudenosaunee.
And I'm not an Indigenous person. I'm a mixed race person. So my family is a mix of Polish, Black, Brazilian Portuguese, and métis. Caicara is a métis people. So I have-- I don't consider myself an Indigenous person because I'm a mix, but I spent a lot of time in my childhood in a community that at that time didn't have electricity, tap water, and still doesn't have cars at all.
And my experience spending time there really formed the person that I am and really formed how I see the world. And this life that was split between the Indigenous world and the modern world, I'm still living in this split life. From Brazil, I moved to Montreal to do grad school. And I say that I was formed as a researcher in Atikamekw Territory in Central Quebec.
I worked as an RA when I was doing my master's. And then I did my PhD research with the Atikamekw Nation. And I was part of the research group of Professor Elizabeth Kaine Huron-Wendat. She passed away last year, and she was UNESCO chair in the transmission of First Peoples culture to foster well-being and empowerment.
Her area of study was Indigenous design, but she was so much more than that, so much more. Her work was especially about repairing relationships between universities and communities, so she led several university communities alliances. And finally, she really influenced the Canadian National Research policy.
She was a trailblazer, and I am so happy and blessed to have worked with her for so many years. When I was part of her research group, I did my PhD research. That was a participatory project with the Atikamekw Nation that involved several generations, youth, some established artists, some older artisans.
So we connected different generations, the generation that went to the residential school, the generation before the residential school and the youth in creative activities. And what I think it's important here, and that I really thank Professor Kaine, was creating a project that is still active. I still receive messages from them that are using the methods, the strategies that we created together.
And I learned there that yes, many times when you do participatory projects, you have this dichotomy between the academics, the designers who usually are white, and the community partners, who are First Nations. And I realized that I brought a different perspective. I brought this perspective from the South and from the communities of South America.
And now I realize that when I go back there, I bring the perspective from the North to Brazil. And this is amazing still. And many people ask me, yes, you are a graphic designer. What graphic design has to do with Indigenous communities? And I say, graphic design is about an essential human power, creating a representation to assert who you are and to influence how others perceive you, how you represent yourself, how you represent what you know.
So the Tapiskwan workshops were about exercising the power of representation, representing the identity of the Atikamekw Nation. So a lot of the research in graphic design, social design is about representing cultural identity, but also about increasing the power of self-representation of invisible or misrepresented groups and representation of knowledge.
How can we do an epistemic decolonization? How can we represent ways of knowing of colonized people? And that is how-- in designing, we are always asking how, how we share who we are, how we share what we know. We discuss the form we do.
And I always give this example of a printed Latin Bible from 1480. And our journals are not really different from that still. And that's something important to imagine, that every time we are talking about Indigenous communities, that we are talking about other forms of sharing knowledge, storytelling, experiential learning. There are many other forms.
So why it is important to me to talk about it? Because colonialism was not only about the dispossession of land-- There is a lot. And exploitation of people-- there is a lot. It was about the destruction of knowledge systems. It's a very big part of the legacy of colonialism.
So we call it the epistemicide, the destruction of knowledge system, because the Western epistemic canon, that what we learn here, became the only valid way to represent the world, the only. So it means that societies became incapable of representing the world in their own terms.
And what I see with my students, it really deeply affect them. So they come here to master, of course, the Western epistemic canon, to master Western ways of thinking and knowing, to have a career. But it's a hostile environment because the universities don't value or respect Indigenous ways of knowing. Don't know.
And then I ask, aren't we continuing the mindset of "Kill the Indian and save the man"? And this power imbalance that you have to learn everything about the Western ways in a context that really doesn't respect your ways of knowing is a power imbalance that negatively impacts Indigenous mental, physical, and emotional well-being. And I decided to talk about it exactly because of my conversation with my students.
So that's why when we talk about pathways to the future, let's discuss the future. Can we talk about epistemic justice? Can we talk about manners, ways to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing in research and education? What steps-- and I ask you-- what steps can we take to have intercultural respect, to support Indigenous research priorities? Really, what steps can we take?
And many times I like to mention that people think that social justice, you have groups, the haves and have-nots, and you transfer what you have to the have-nots. But I really believe that social justice is about recognizing the value people have, even if it's different from what you have. And I really believe that there is no real social justice without epistemic justice. And our Indigenous students deserve to have their ways of knowing valued and respected in the university so then they can flourish.
So this is what I had to say today. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
MEREDITH PALMER: Can you hear me if I don't carry it, if I don't hold the mic ? OK, because I'm a gesticulator.
[LAUGHTER]
Hey, everyone. It's really nice to be here. My name is Meredith Alberta Palmer. I am Tuscarora of Six Nations of the Grand River. I grew up in Center City, Philly and a bit in Ithaca, bit in Vermont. And Lynda already introduced me, but I'll go back over my experience and why I might be here a little bit as well.
So I did-- Ithaca hasn't let me go, no matter how hard I've tried. I came here first in '95, when my mom started a English program alongside Native Studies. Jane Mount Pleasant was here, knew me as an awkward teenager.
And that's when I started to get to know what was called AIP back then, the American Indian Program. And I amazingly got to meet Ron LaFrance as a kid, who was a very important person. Then I came back. I transferred in from Tompkins Cortland Community College to finish my undergrad here, which I did in development sociology.
And then I came back after doing my PhD at Berkeley to do a Cornell Presidential postdoc, which unfortunately only ran for three years. It was dissolved during the pandemic, but it was a really wonderful program that offered three years of research time. And of course, I started that in 2020. And I started that just as Bobby Lee and Tristan Ahtone's report from High Country News on the land-grab university theft came out.
I believe it was February of 2020. And so very graciously, the people who were heading up a group to address that history offered that I join, even though I was just a mere postdoc. And I learned so much from them. I'm really honored to be in the room with some of those leaders, like Ben Maracle, who's here in the front row, and Troy Richardson over there, and others who were really at the head of that.
In 2021, I gave a talk on that history and my own analysis of it, which I know Lynda sat in on, which I think was part of the reason for my invitation here. And so I haven't been part of that group in a year and a half since I started at University at Buffalo. But I'm going to give some comments on that history. So that'll be the first part of what I talk to you all about today.
And then I also want to delve into what is also a large portion of my work, which is what archives can tell us about today, because that, I think, is so central. And I was really appreciating going through your online archive and the digital curated project you put together.
And I'm so happy to see family members here as well. I think that's absolutely key. So I want to talk about that as well. So who here-- just a show of hands very quickly. So I know who I'm talking to, who here has a very good sense of the 1862 Morrill Act and Cornell's involvement in it?
How many hands? OK, so mostly everybody in the room. That's really good. I'm glad I don't have to do a lot of that legwork. Right now, there's the cuidblog.com, I think it is. Is that the current website? That has all of the wonderful information and research, a timeline of the actions that people here at Cornell have taken to get this addressed at Cornell, on part of the administration.
There's also a landgrabu.org itself, which shows you all of the land that Cornell was involved in dealing with out West. And then after I did that talk, I wrote a paper based on it, which I know has been useful for some people in teaching it. It was in Acme, an international journal for critical geographies, which I chose because it's open access. I wanted people to have access to this.
It's called "Good Intentions Are Not Good Relations, Grounding the Terms of Debt and Redress at Land-Grab Universities." So for those folks who are professors, this could be a useful thing to teach at the beginning of your courses, I think. I know a lot of you do already, though.
So the 1862 Morrill Act, the way I frame it that I think is so important is that it was part of this triad of imperial policies of the United States government at the time, alongside the Homestead Act, the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, which took all of these lands that were very recently obtained through massacres, genocide, duplicitous treaties, treaties made under extreme duress, and defined this land as public land.
And what was so important about this was that by defining it as public land, as the US government, it opened it up for settlement. Under the 1831 Marshall Trilogy, an extremely important set of Supreme Court cases in the United States. The Marshall Trilogy itself codified into law that for any dispossessed land from Native people to come under US jurisdiction, title had to be registered at the county level.
This is the very nitty gritty of this legal sort of system, this bureaucratic machine and machination that sort of grew as a dispossessed form. And so in order for that to happen, these sections of very recently dispossessed land became part of the Morrill Act, of the Homestead Act, of the Pacific Railroad Act. And we've talked about redistribution in the talk today.
The Homestead Act of 1862 is the single biggest piece of legislation that redistributed land and resources in this country. And it was on the backs of Native dispossession. I think that's really important to remember when we talk about social justice, when we talk about change, when we talk about redistribution of resources, from whom going to whom is very important here.
And so that was what the Morrill Act was part of. It has often been written about, until really the last four years, except by a few wonderful scholars who have critiqued it before Lee and Ahtone's focus, as a very beneficial act, as something very well intentioned, something that was the basis of public education in this country.
But to understand it critically as part of this triad of imperial policies of genocide, I think is absolutely key. And so understanding that we see that institutions such as Cornell, which had the largest monetary gain from the Morrill Act by far and dealt in the most amount of land, largely because of Ezra Cornell's own prowess, market prowess, Cornell University is very much based on very bad relations with Indigenous people.
Sometimes we talk about-- and I teach this in my classes. Sometimes we talk about with relations with Indigenous people as something that is necessarily positive. We talk about being in relation with someone, and it might invoke sort of a warm, friendly feeling. But--
AUDIENCE: Not feeling it.
MEREDITH PALMER: [LAUGHS] Thank you, Jane. But you can also be in very bad relation with people, and that doesn't mean you're not in relation with them. And so I think something that I really was learning from the faculty working group and also from all of the undergraduate students who began working on this issue in 2020, was to start really thinking about what repair can look like. What can Cornell do to repair relations with Indigenous nations, that it has been part of the dispossession, which we now know is over 251, through the Morrill Act, and also the Haudenosaunee people within New York State and also other Indigenous people from Maine down to Long Island?
And I think so often when we enter into discussions of repair, it often becomes a discussion about inclusion. How can Native students be included in a university like Cornell? About retention, questions about faculty and getting more faculty here.
But I think it's very important to just start these discussions not just about bringing more students and letting Cornell have good numbers, good retention numbers, checking the boxes that they have the right percentage of Native students relative to the general population. I think it has to be grounded, much more importantly, in good relations with nations.
Something I learned from Renata, Dr. Leitao here, was that she worked with someone who dedicated her entire career to repairing university-community relationships. This is an expertise. It is a deep knowledge of how to do this. It is not something that people who don't have that deep knowledge of engaging with Native nations and of diplomacy and understanding can do off the cuff. And I think that's very important to understand.
I think the history of boarding schools is very important here, too. And I'm very glad it was brought up by both of these speakers. When I was looking through the digital archival collection that Lynda put together, I saw the applications for the four women that were highlighted. And they listed-- and some other students as well, who were here at Cornell, some Haudenosaunee students.
And almost all of them except, I think, one or two, listed some Indian boarding schools as where they were coming from, either Carlisle or state-run institutions such as Tunesassa, and also the Thomas Indian School, which were both run by New York State and charitable organizations.
So I think the history of boarding schools isn't just an analogy. It's actually a direct lineage. And something I learned from my mom, actually, is she ran a lot of the graduation ceremonies where she was teaching at Dartmouth College and worked with a lot of students and was really an excellent mentor of Native students there, is to always remember to thank Native families and communities for sending their children here, for trusting us with their children.
To have Native students isn't a benefit for them. It is a benefit for the Cornell community to be able to learn from Native students, to be able to start to build and repair those connections, hopefully. So the students will do the work that is necessary. As we saw in the video, a lot of them will return to their own communities. But I think switching an understanding here from something that is inclusion is something that is done out of largess by the University needs to be flipped, and that it is a gift to have Indigenous students here on the campus.
And I think there's also a very long history that our students have to draw on of Haudenosaunee nations, Haudenosaunee people, and especially Haudenosaunee women who have a very long history of discerning what is and is not useful for our nations. You can look back as far in the archives in the 1700s of sending students or not, or choosing not to send students to institutions of Western knowledge in order to bring back what is necessary.
You could even go back into the Jesuit records to see how a lot of Native people were curious. That curiosity of and intellect of Haudenosaunee people has always been there for hundreds of years throughout colonization and in present day. And I think the way our students can learn things here and bring them back to their communities, be they urban, be they on our reserves, be they in the surrounding communities, I think is absolutely vital.
And I think highlighting, as I began to see in some of Lynda's work, the way that the nation understood themselves as sending representatives was so key. And I'm so happy you found that in the archive, Lynda, because the students were chosen by their communities to come. It wasn't a competition. It was people who were sent here to find out what was useful from this sort of institution of knowledge and bring it back to communities.
And I think this is absolutely central for understanding how inclusion is not the goal of redress for things such as the 1862 Morrill Act. Because the center of Haudenosaunee knowledge and all Indigenous knowledge is on the land. It's not in places like this. We can come here and learn methods and make new communities, as students did in boarding schools. But the center of it is on the land and with the people and with our mothers, our grandmothers and our aunties and our elders and all of the other beings who live there.
And I think that is really one of the most important things to remember when we're talking about repair. The other aspect I wanted to talk about today is what archives can tell us. I study archives not as a historian, but as a geographer. So I think about them as spaces and spaces that have networks and that we have relations to and that suspend relations within them through documents, through archives, through files, et cetera.
And I think, of course, the first most important thing to note is that archives are not time travel portals. We don't go back in history when we enter archives, even though we may try to find out something about the past. Of course, obviously, they don't tell us any one truth about the past.
That is not new. That's of course not my idea. But they do offer us new ways to narrate our historic present. And that is what I think is very valuable about this kind of work.
So another thing I wanted to mention on Thursday I was sitting in HARK, which is a tiny little office we have on UB's campus. And it stands for the Haudenosaunee Archive and resource Knowledge Center. And this is something that the incredible Haudenosaunee women who started the Indigenous Studies department at UB have gotten a grant to put together and start their own archive.
And one, it has so many implications for creating your own archive that is not held by another power. First is, of course, of copyright. As much as we work with these archives, they still own these documents. They own the photos of our ancestors. They own their letters. That is a very important question of ownership.
The second is one that I learned from Dr. Mia McKie, who is a [INAUDIBLE] of the Tuscarora Nation. She is now working on a project to think about the metadata included in archives. And to think about the metadata is what you get when you search something, when you're trying to find it and you're just searching around in an archive and like googling, but in archives.
And one of the important things she's thinking about is how to make nation and Indigenous-specific metadata. For example, for our communities, your clan would absolutely be key. And just having this in the notes is not enough. It needs to be a key metadata term that is searchable so we can understand who was in our bear clans and our heron clans, so we can recreate and understand those histories better, because that is the basis of our governance systems.
Clanship is the basis of our governance systems. And there's ways in which organizing archives along a Western grain doesn't fulfill the needs that our communities have for them. So on Thursday, anyway, back to the story-- that was a tangent.
On Thursday, I was sitting in a HARK with Dr. McKie, and she was showing me a folder she had put together of publications of Indian Studies, which was a journal that was published here at Cornell by Native students and staff and some community members. And I slid out one from its sleeve, and it was from summer 1984. And I was flipping through it, and there was an article about Erl Bates.
[LAUGHS] I was like, oh, how interesting. And there was no author to this article. This was one that was put together by people such-- who might recognize the names such as Katsi Cook, José Barreiro, and many others.
And it was not necessarily critical. It was very factual. It followed the lines of understanding what he was doing. And one interesting point it made, Erl Bates being the person who really pushed for and got money for the extension program towards Native people in New York State, Cornell's extension program in the 1920s.
One very interesting thing the article noted is that the author of the article did research on how Native people, and particularly Haudenosaunee people, were being represented in other circles in legislation, in news articles at the time, which is still as savages. And so we can look at Erl Bates's work now as extremely outdated, as racist and other things. And I think--
But it was interesting to see this article just from 40 years ago, from 1984, not saying he was the best, not saying he was the worst, but saying that he was doing something different than other people were. And it's also important to remember that this was the time of the Everett Report. For those of you who know Haudenosaunee history, the Everett Report was put together by a New York State legislator, Edward Everett, and was absolutely buried until 1971 because it determined that Haudenosaunee people were owed millions upon millions of acres that were illegally taken by the State of New York.
And the legislature did not like this. It was buried until much later, when his stenographer, Lulu Stillman, brought it back up. And this is still a document that is useful, that has really important historical knowledge. And so that wasn't archived in any actual government archive. It was kept by the stenographer, who was barely paid for her work.
So where are these archives? Where are these spaces of relationships, these networks of relations and connection? Often they're not in these powerful institutions, such as the one we're sitting in today.
I also think it's important how our critical views can shift. And what I really think is the most important-- one of the most important things that we can do with these archives, at least from my perspective-- and I'd love to hear from others-- but is connecting them back with descendants and families.
I think that finding that connection is absolutely key to descendants and also to community. There's also a very interesting piece of work that I've learned from by Susan Burch, who wrote a book on the Canton Asylum, which was the only Native American insane asylum just for Native Americans.
It was in the United States. And she wrote a book on it. And her work was not just connecting archives with descendants of people who were institutionalized there, but also connecting it with the people who ran it and started it, and letting them know what their ancestors were involved in. So accountability work for those who were the perpetrators of violence as well, which I think is also important work.
So yeah, I hope people can keep doing the work of understanding what redress would look like for the Morrill Act. I think the long history that Lynda has helped us get at today of Haudenosaunee people and Haudenosaunee women understanding very well what is good and not good for their communities. And making those choices is something we can learn from in that story of repair, in that hopeful future, though, despite my time here, didn't give me much hope of that, honestly, working with administrators.
But we hold it nonetheless. And I'm very happy to be here with you all, and I look forward to the opening and your comments. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: All right. Well, thank you to our three panelists for such informative and insightful and thought-provoking presentations on Indigenous perspectives in education across the board, focusing on higher education, but also thinking about that important role in adolescence. And there's a lot of themes that came up related to representation, reciprocity. And I also really like this notion of repair.
And so I actually want to open it up first just to the audience. Of course, I have a couple of questions. I saw some people head out, so I just want to make sure for those who maybe want to ask either three of the panelists or myself questions related to this topic to give you guys the floor and ask that if you would like to do so at this moment.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
[CHUCKLING]
My name is Jane Mount Pleasant, Tuscarora, faculty emeritus in the School of Integrated Plant Sciences and past director of the American Indian Program. And I just have a very simple question for folks here at Cornell and those that have been at Cornell is how do you contain your anger against this institution? Every time I hear parts of this story, I become enraged. How do you contain that rage?
MEREDITH PALMER: I suppose I can take that one.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I'm calling ambulance.
[LAUGHTER]
MEREDITH PALMER: Thank you, Jane, for that question. In many ways I couldn't contain it, which is one of the reasons I left. Cornell offered me a tenure-track job as well, and I chose the one at UB. And it was a very hard decision because there were so many incredible students and faculty here that I felt like I was leaving. Maybe they didn't want me either, but I wanted them.
[LAUGHTER]
And that was a really hard decision. But because I've been back and forth here since I was 11 and seeing the way my mother was treated here and seeing the way-- I had an OK experience here. Jane opened the door for me, and I really appreciate that.
You've been such an important person in our community for so very long. And then when I returned as a postdoc, Troy's involvement and Jolene Rickard's involvement and many others, sustained me. But I didn't see it long term.
And the work that was done at Buffalo, at UB, to also build on a legacy of Indian Studies, now called Indigenous Studies, it was just something I couldn't imagine Cornell doing. They went around to clan mothers and faith keepers for a year before they got a grant of $4 million grant to start our department, to ask them what they wanted to have studied here-- there. Where am I?
[LAUGHTER]
There at Buffalo. And the choice was language, environment, and health. And those were the focuses decided by the communities. And so those are our focus. Dr. Jolene Rickard had to fight for so many years just to have Cayuga taught here on campus. For years, right?
And now people know. People know that it's Onondaga land. They didn't know that before that. At UB, now they're teaching three of the six Haudenosaunee languages. And I'm not going to make this a giant comparison. Things aren't perfect, but I needed a place with-- I needed a place with community. And I didn't see that here, despite the incredible people here.
So it is a rage-inducing situation that is decades long, if not centuries. So to contain it, I ran away from it, I suppose.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I retired to get away.
[LAUGHTER]
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: Oh, yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you all so very much. So I was just wondering. I really enjoyed all of your talks and also about pedagogy specifically as well. I was a secondary school teacher before I got here. But that's also one of the questions from what you were just saying.
With so many things in place that are against community and within-- I teach an FWS, so you have students from all over, from all over the campus. What are ways that are most effective to still create those communities also within those like short spaces?
You do your best. Yeah. But yeah, I was wondering what you wanted to say about that perhaps in those specific environments as well that are where you see your students for just one semester perhaps. Yeah. I hope that was good.
[LAUGHTER]
ADAM HOFFMAN: So I teach a class called Native American psychology. And I just really appreciate from the very beginning of the class, I ask my students to raise their hand if they don't identify as Native. And usually it's most of the students in my class.
But from there, I know where I'm starting. And I think that that's a really important point as an educator on Native issues, especially to know what they're coming to the classroom with. But then from there, then slowly instilling different ways of thinking and knowing to help them to be able to understand an Indigenous perspective or ontogeny or way of knowing or being from the very beginning.
And so just making sure that you ease them in. That's what you have to do for a lot of these non-Native students that we're having in our classroom but wanting to learn about this. And I think that that's a really great thing about the students here at Cornell.
And I teach it at the undergraduate level, this course, and they're excited, and they want to learn. And they're engaged. They want to think in different ways and new ways of knowing. We just have to provide that to them and with them. And so that's what I do there with that.
AUDIENCE: Going off of that, with incorporating different ways of knowing into our classrooms, I have pitched this to some of my professors before. And an answer I get a lot of the time is, well, we use the scientific method because it's the best way to understand science or biological questions.
[AUDIO OUT] have any advice [AUDIO OUT] sort of reaction from professors? I'm applying for a position, and I'd really like to incorporate different ways of knowing in my curriculums. Yeah. Thank you.
RENATA LEITAO: It's funny because we just said yes, that's the best way to get to know things. But then I ask, is this the best way to learn how to act, how to build something? Just an example. We know about the environmental crisis, the climate crisis. We have even more emissions now than five years ago.
The level of circularity now is lower than two years ago. It's ridiculous. So yes, you generate knowledge, but is this knowledge the kind of knowledge that allow us to create change, to act? So that's something that I always ask.
Yes, you can have so analyze everything, but does this kind of way of knowing allow you to have wise decisions to really change in a way that can ensure the future of anyone, anyone, of life on the planet? No, no, no, no. So that's what I argue.
MEREDITH PALMER: I would say there's probably-- and you probably know this, but so many good resources on onto-epistemological learning and land-based pedagogy. I think that's absolutely key to getting out of the classroom to do that and to read our bodies' experiences differently than through the conventional modes of the written word or the spoken word or even just images and pictures to feel, to breathe, to breathe with other people, to be with other beings and what that can provide is absolutely tremendous.
And I think a lot of learning comes out of that. Yeah, I don't know if that's been a good resource for you or not.
AUDIENCE: Well, I'll definitely look [INAUDIBLE] a lot more.
MEREDITH PALMER: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
MEREDITH PALMER: Yeah. Good luck.
MODERATOR: I have a question from our online attendees. He writes, "My name is Sage Printup, Tuscarora and Algonquin, class of 2023." Wrote, "What role do you think alumni can have in helping prospective and current students other than donations to NAISAC?"
MEREDITH PALMER: Maybe the students want to answer this one.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm an Indigenous student on campus, a part of NAISAC. And I just think the biggest, one of the biggest challenges we have is that student turnover rate. Every four years, people are graduating, especially with COVID.
We need people who can pass down knowledge. I mean, we're reteaching the freshmen every year of what the Morrill Act is and just those things of knowing what has been done. And I could see that being a role of alumni is helping to know what's being done. And that puts pressure on administration to do things if they know that it's not just the students who are being turned over every four years but we have community support as well.
ADAM HOFFMAN: Yeah, I also think that alumni are a really great bridge for-- as a researcher, I'm thinking about having Cornell relations in these communities going back to these communities and being able to act as a bridge for positive relationships that are mutually beneficial for these communities, but also for the research and making sure that it's truly, truly beneficial.
And so I think that's a great way that alumni could help connect people to other community stakeholders to be able to do, socially responsible, good research with these communities.
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: Right. And I think that even goes beyond this notion, as you're saying, of inclusion. That's actually allowing Indigenous peoples to take ownership and make sure that they are the ones that are impacting or initiating that type of transfer of knowledge and so that it's not necessarily when you already come to campus, you're in the classroom, you see that there's a land acknowledgment on, say, your syllabus. It's something that you're already coming to the classroom with from the very beginning.
And I have, I guess, a follow-up question for the panelists on that, which is, if there are faculty here today with us or are online that maybe aren't Indigenous, but they are inspired by the conversation or inspired by other conversations that have been happening on campus, how would you encourage them? What would be your call to action to make sure that they are addressing the needs of not just their students, but Indigenous students that might be in their classroom, or making sure that they are not enacting these same histories of just prioritizing Western forms of knowledge and knowing and what might advice you have-- would you have for them if they're here and interested in enacting and engaging with these different perspectives and ways of knowing the world?
ADAM HOFFMAN: I always think we should-- and I learned this from the American Indian Center at UNC Chapel Hill-- walk softly and listen carefully. So talk to people and keep your mouth shut. Let them do the talking to you. Ask questions, learn more, be involved in the community. Be there and hear what's going on.
And then from there you can work together with whatever group you're working with to be able to then to enact this thing. And do it from the very beginning all the way through the end. Because that way they can help make sure that this is done in a way that's proper and responsible and not going to cause damage, when you're doing it together in that way.
RENATA LEITAO: So I think it's important to spend time, of course, and not only listening, but just having fun and understanding each other. But I also understand that if you go there only to ask questions, you are not really engaging. This is not. So it's about also to learn how to reframe your questions and also to listen to the questions that your potential partners have.
So just you are defining more a broader understanding of what is going on. Because if you come there-- if you go there and you have lots of questions, and you don't change the way you think, there is something wrong. So it's important to arrive and be open to change the way you understand the situation. Yes.
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: We have another-- one more question online?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. Having just moved from Lawrence, Kansas, I'm very aware of Haskell Indian Nations University. Is there a possibility of collaborations with Haskell and land-grant universities as one way of repairing?
MEREDITH PALMER: I would say I'd love to see a tribal university here in Upstate New York. That would be my goal. Which is maybe a very different answer than they wanted. But that's what I would love to see. And I think I've learned and absorbed that dream from other people in Haudenosaunee communities as well, seeing a space that was-- there's tribal universities in lots of places. And the way that it can center Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous governance and Indigenous-- all sorts of-- just getting students back into their communities as well, I think, is so key. And also language.
So sometimes the way I think about it is the most important kind of relationships that can exist with large institutions of knowledge creation, like Cornell, are ones that lead to Indigenous flourishing. And usually that means on the land in various ways. And so gearing kinds of education towards that flourishing, I think, is the most important thing.
Of course, we all have different ideas of what that might mean. It doesn't mean we all agree on it. But what I would love to see-- and of course, Haskell has such a long history. It was a boarding school, and now it's a tribal university itself. But what I would love to see is something of that mode here in Upstate New York.
A minor ask.
[LAUGHTER]
RENATA LEITAO: Just a tiny ask. What I would say is that collaboration can have so many different flavors. So it's very important if you-- if collaboration is something that is beneficial maybe. So just how you collaborate, that is the most important part of understanding that if it's going to be beneficial or not.
And many times I see so many sometimes well-intended actions. And I remember I visited a school that had just received many, many, many iPads and computers, but there was no support for land-based education, no support. And just say, yes, had a partnership that gave the electronics, the equipment, but how, then, can you connect with land-based education? That was the link that wasn't there.
So when you're going to collaborate, it's very important to respect exactly the ways of knowing. And that's what can make a collaboration beneficial.
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: OK. Well, I think we have time for maybe one more final question before our final remarks. We have a question here.
AUDIENCE: Hello, I'm an outsider. I'm not an educator, and I'm not from here. Although I will say I'm from Minnesota, and we address some very similar problems. But since this was the last question and I didn't want to interfere with the discussion about all the ideas you have and everything you said is already there and ready to be put in place, and many--
So I have to ask the question, is there is no funding available? What's the political support? You have a lot of things ready to go, and I'm guessing there's not enough money and not enough political support.
AUDIENCE: And the day before an election.
[LAUGHTER]
MEREDITH PALMER: That's a hard one.
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: That is a hard one.
ADAM HOFFMAN: Yeah, that's right. What would it take to enact everything we're talking about? Yeah, more money.
MEREDITH PALMER: Yeah, more. More money would be nice.
ADAM HOFFMAN: More money.
[LAUGHTER]
Also, I think about, tribal sovereignty, though, the political aspects of the United States' domestic dependent nations being able to continuously make these decisions for themselves. And that's of course, important. And we think about the politics and what is the Department of the Interior going to look like after this next election? That's really important.
And so yeah, of course, I hope that the pendulum continues to swing towards increased tribal sovereignty so that these nations can be making these decisions for themselves and flourishing in their own ways that they would like. But also more money. Yeah.
MEREDITH PALMER: I guess some of it, of course, goes back to good relations. We can talk about wanting to have a tribal liaison. We can talk about wanting to have people in all of these positions. But then the question is, who? Who would want to come work here at Cornell? Who is going to do the work of all that change and take that on their backs?
And I have so much respect for the people who stay here and do that. But it's a hard place to be, right? And even if we came in with what, $1 billion grant, OK, maybe Cornell would bend to that and then have some sort of foundation with some post-docs and whatnot.
But would it change the structures? Would it allow that sort of political will for the actual something beyond inclusion? Would it allow for some form of land back, some form of repair, some form of allowing for Indigenous flourishing? Who knows?
Those take a lot more than I think anything you can throw money at. That takes a lot of repair of relationships and changing and thinking in how we relate and care for each other. And I don't mean that in a flimsy way. I mean that really on-the-ground way.
So money and relationships.
[LAUGHTER]
RENATA LEITAO: Respect.
MEREDITH PALMER: And respect.
LYNDA XEPOLEAS: Yeah.
[CHUCKLING]
From 1914 to 1942, Cornell’s Department of Home Economics and later, New York State College of Home Economics, received federal, state, and private funding to create extension programs and scholarships for Hodino¿_hso´:nih women. These programs sought to improve family life through scientific research, which largely disregarded Indigenous perspectives and needs. Despite this, the archival record shows how Hodino¿_hso´:nih women made space for themselves and their communities within and outside of the College.In conjunction with the opening of the new exhibit “Redressing Histories of Early Hodino¿_hso´:nih Women at Cornell, 1914-1942” in the Mann Library lobby, a panel discussion held at Mann Library on November 4, 2024 expands upon the Cornell College of Human Ecology’s early history to examine current institutional practices and contexts that can better support the success, health, and well-being of Indigenous students in higher education today. Panelists featured include Meredith Palmer (Tuscarora of Six Nations at Grand River; Department of Geography & Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo), Adam Hoffman (Dept. of Psychology, College of Human Ecology at Cornell University), Renata Leitao (Dept. of Human-Centered Design, College of Human Ecology & the American Indian and Indigenous Study Program at Cornell University), with moderation by exhibit curator Lynda Xepoleas (School of Fashion Design and Merchandising at Kent State University). This event was co-sponsored by the College of Human Ecology, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, and Cornell University Library.
