IUPUI and the IU School of Liberal Arts is pleased to announce the receipt of an award in the amount of $149,662 from the Mellon Foundation for the Landback Universities project (landbackuniversities.org). Centering the principles of LANDBACK, a movement that locates liberation for Indigenous people and people of color in “putting Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands,” Landback Universities seeks to collaboratively develop a vision of higher education rooted in collective stewardship of the lands on which colleges and universities sit through humanistic inquiry.
Recognizing that there are myriad ways that colonialism operates through our institutions, Landback Universities focus on humanities-based approaches to land relations because rematriation of land lies at the heart of decolonization. In this context, Landback Universities has three objectives: 1) explore how to facilitate conversations between faculty, administrators, staff, and students to develop strategies for meaningfully decolonizing university operations; 2) develop and disseminate recommendations that colleges and universities can implement to return stewardship of university lands to Native nations they have dispossessed; 3) serve as a proof-of-concept for using these methods to identify strategies that promote Indigenous sovereignty throughout the diverse range of offices, operations, and units that comprise universities.
Humanities-based approaches to land relations address these issues through scholarship in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Political Science, History, Anthropology, and Ethnic Studies. These disciplines merge critical thinking with practices of ethnography and auto-ethnography, textual interpretation and discourse analysis, archival research, and community-engaged social justice research. Together they allow us to understand land relations not just as political and legal sovereignty but as an Indigenous-centered worldview.
Landback Universities is co-led by Jennifer Guiliano—Associate Professor of History, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and American Studies in the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI; Megan Red Shirt-Shaw (Oglala Lakota)—Director of Native Student Services at the University of South Dakota and Doctoral Student in Organizational Leadership at the University of Minnesota; Roopika Risam—Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Faculty, Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster at Dartmouth College; and Elizabeth Rule (enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation)—Assistant Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University.
For more information please visit landbackuniversities.org or email guiliano@iu.edu with Landback Universities in the subject line.