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TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2022 tuftsdaily.com

after the storm: environmental injustices in Massachusetts’ sewage system

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant in the Boston Harbor is pictured.

by Jillian Collins

Features Editor

Originally published Dec. 2, 2021.

After a storm, sewage systems can get overwhelmed with water. Instead of pouring excess sewage into basements, the system is designed to discharge sewage into nearby rivers — the same bodies of water that are used for drinking and recreational purposes. The contaminated water has been linked to an increase of various diseases. Due to redlining and systematic racism, these contaminated waters are more likely to run through low-income populations and communities of color.

As a public health issue that is expensive to fix and one that disproportionately affects marginalized groups, solutions are not prioritized by legislators and engineers. Yet, despite these barriers, there are currently people educating communities about water quality and cleaning up polluted waters.

Nathan Sanders, a data scientist and a volunteer member of the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) policy committee, has done extensive research on the Massachusetts sewage system, using an environmental justice lens.

“The way our sewer systems are designed in Massachusetts and in many other older communities is to intentionally dump sewage into the river when it rains,” Sanders said. “That is a little bit appalling and essentially illegal under federal law, but there are very understandable reasons why the system is designed that way.”

To begin, the system was created for a much smaller population and not for the scale it is today.

“Three hundred years ago, I think that made perfect sense. We had these bodies of water that weren’t necessarily used by a lot of people … and the volume of sewage was relatively low at that time,” Sanders said. “Adding a trickle of sewage to a big flowing river maybe didn’t seem like a big problem. But now, as … the volume of the sewage discharge has grown, and we have more people using the river actively, it’s created a real public health concern.”

Rachel Wagner, a senior studying environmental studies, interned at the MyRWA, where she focused on water testing and environmental justice work. She explained that levels of nitrogen and phosphorus increase in the water after a storm due to runoff and sewage discharge.

“There are a lot of problems with this pollution of phosphorus and nitrogen, because they come from excess fertilizers on people’s lawns [and from] people who don’t pick up their dogs’ waste that has nitrogen and phosphorus,” Wagner said. “That runoff that goes into storm drains, which goes directly into our water sources. [It] is basically an lover-stimulant in the environment, and it causes intense reactions of growth and then death.”

These chemicals are also in the sewage that is discharged in the river, causing bacteria to grow.

“Phosphorus and nitrogen are both limiting nutrients, which means that they basically are the predictors of growth and they are required for the growth of algae,” Wagner said. “You’ll see [algae] blooms … so you see a lot of dead fish in the rivers after huge storm events.”

When it storms, there is an increase of various diseases due to sewage overflow and runoff polluting the water.

Massachusetts State Sen. Pat Jehlen, who has been combating sewage overflow for over a decade, explained that after a storm, there is an increased number of hospitalizations. Even COVID-19 may spread through sewage in the Mystic River after a storm.

Similarly, Sanders noted there is an increase in gastrointestinal illnesses being reported after rainstorms.

“The main concern for the Mystic River is recreational contact,” Sanders said. “People who are boating or swimming in the river, who may incidentally touch the river while they’re walking along it, or if they fall out of the boat. That has also led to illnesses.”

The areas where these sewage discharges are located are commonly found in marginalized communities, making wastewater pollution an environmental justice issue, according to Wagner.

“You see all of [the pollution] downstream, and the communities that are downstream tend to be those at high risk, like communities of color [or] low-income populations that are put at a heightened risk for no reason,” Wagner said.

As with many problems in the United States, sewage overflow is connected to systemic racism.

“There’s systemic racism that has caused those communities that are on less desirable lands to be the ones that are affordable,” Sanders said. “I think the underlying connection here is the history of industrialization and urban development in our state which has caused certain communities to develop with these combined sewer systems.”

Higher-income communities have had the privilege of being able to deal with water pollution. In 1985, the Boston Harbor Case, under the interpretation of the Clean Air Act, decided that Massachusetts had to clean up the wastewater pollution.

“The judge determined that Massachusetts has to clean them up, we have to fix the sewage discharges,” Sanders said. “The court also recognized that it’s too expensive … and that just wasn’t going to happen. So the court allowed for what is called a long-term control planning process.”

The long-term control planning process (LTCP) allowed for the state agency to complete an analysis on how it could most efficiently spend its money to deal with the pollution. This resulted in wealthier areas being prioritized for cleanup. For example, the City of Cambridge spent a portion of the $1 billion on cleaning the Charles River, according to Sanders.

The reporting of water quality has been the most controversial barrier in dealing with sewage overflow, due to the expensive cleanup cost. The operators of sewage treatment plans do not want to report water quality because they don’t want to be held responsible, according to Jehlen.

Alongside others, Jehlen proposed a bill for public notification of sewage discharge.

“For years, we couldn’t pass this bill because certain operators said, ‘We don’t want to report when we release partially treated sewage,’” Jehlen said.

In January, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker signed the bill; however, regulators have played with terminology to get around reporting water quality.

“We said [the bill] includes partially treated [sewage], so the new [regulators] have a new term which exempts blended sewage, which is the same as partially treated [sewage],” Jehlen said.

The fight for public notifications is ongoing, but there are other ways to educate communities about their water quality.

In areas of the Mystic River, individuals will fish for food without knowing the water is contaminated. Wagner worked with a team at MyRWA to put up fish advisories that explain the dangers of fishing in polluted water.

“A lot of environmental justice communities get their food, especially fish, from the Mystic, which is really problematic,” Wagner said. “[We’re] putting up signs in different languages, especially in Spanish, in areas like East Boston, Chelsea [and] Revere.”

There are also ways to change infrastructure to prevent water pollution during a storm.

“You got infiltration trenches, which are a super helpful way to prevent that phosphorus and nitrogen pollution that you’re seeing from those intense storms,” Wagner said. “Rain gardens [are] also a really good way to hold on to the water.”

Jehlen explained how legislation can also be used to encourage more resilient infrastructures.

“It has to do with your building codes and your zoning so that you don’t allow the building of impervious [structures, like] giant parking lots, which cause runoff,” Jehlen said. “They don’t cause it, but they don’t have any filtration.”

While select groups are putting in the work to combat wastewater pollution, the issue is not yet universally prioritized.

“[What] my colleagues and I had done for sewage discharges, I believe that is the first and still only [environmental justice] analysis of this type of pollution that’s been done in the country, at least that I’m aware of,” Sanders said.

As climate change only continues to progress, there will be more storms leading to more water contamination. Wagner encourages students to use their privilege to get involved with water cleanup.

“It’s so easy to get sucked into a ‘Well, we have clean water, we have accessible food that is not polluted,’” Wagner said. “As such privileged people at Tufts … we have an opportunity to make our voices heard, to be part of organizations that are helping like MyRWA and try to do some work.”

The expansion of Tufts’ undergraduate enrollment, Part 2: How big is too big for Tufts?

by Mark Choi

Executive Features Editor

Originally published March 8, 2022.

In a Feb. 18 email, Patrick Collins, Tufts’ executive director of media relations, wrote to the Daily that the “university is halfway through a multi-year enrollment growth management plan that at its conclusion in 2026 will level off with an undergraduate student body of approximately 6,600 full-time students.”

As Tufts University continues to expand its undergraduate enrollment, many community members have wondered whether a bigger Tufts will be the new normal, and if so, how big will ultimately be too big for the Tufts undergraduate population. Many undergraduate students and faculty, in fact, were surprised to hear about the university’s long-term enrollment expansion as they expressed concerns about the issues that might come with overenrollment.

The conversation around the undergraduate enrollment is especially salient as the university’s application pool grows each year, with more than 34,000 students applying to the Tufts undergraduate Class of 2026. Considering that Tufts received slightly less than 20,000 applications for the Class of 2019, the university has seen nearly a 78% increase in the number of applications in just seven years.

According to Collins’ email, the goal of increasing the undergraduate enrollment is to “make a transformative Tufts education available and accessible to more students, with the goal of preparing more young people to make a positive impact on the world.”

On such a view, Tufts’ ever-growing application pool presents the university with a new opportunity to welcome a student body that is more talented and diverse than ever.

Class of 2025 Tufts Community Union Senator Natalie Rossinow similarly explained how the Tufts community could benefit from having more talented students who will bring a wider range of perspectives and ideas to the campus.

“I think that … increasing the student population [can be] good for everyone,” Rossinow said. “Having brighter peers and people from all these different experiences [and] internationally is really beneficial, [and] personally … [it can mean] having a better education and learning from the people around you. … There are so many bright people … [who] deserve to be here, and I think, maybe, the admissions thought that too and had a hard time saying no.”

While acknowledging many benefits of expanding the undergraduate enrollment, John Lurz, an associate professor of English, can also see how preserving the quality of undergraduate experience might be a challenge for Tufts.

“The positive [of increasing the enrollment] is that you get more smart people in one place, and … there’s more opportunity for collaboration and communication,” Lurz said. “The downsides are if the infrastructure of the institution can’t support that, and I think the Hyatt Hotel [is] the most obvious and egregious of the [situation].”

As Lurz pointed out, it is no secret that the university administration scrambled to house approximately 100 first-years in the Hyatt Place for the 2021–22 academic year and converted Blakeley Hall, a previously graduate student dorm for Fletcher students, into undergraduate housing. Compounded by the ongoing pandemic, the university also has faced challenges in isolating community members who test positive for COVID-19.

Overall, as the demand for on-campus housing continues to exceed the number of beds available on campus, the university’s increasing undergraduate enrollment further exacerbates the ongoing housing crisis in Medford/Somerville campus and its host communities — an issue that long predates this year’s overenrollment.

Per Collins, to meet the student body’s ever-growing demand for housing, the university is “continuing to focus on adding more beds and building or renovating more residential spaces on campus” and “[adding] temporary housing on campus next year.”

The university, however, has not announced any official plans to build new dormitories, dining facilities, or other related campus facilities that appear increasingly necessary with the university’s continued expansion of the undergraduate enrollment.

When asked for comment, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences James Glaser said that there is a “substantial” and “advanced” conversation within the university administration “about another residence hall being built on campus.”

In light of the university’s long-term plans to expand its undergraduate population to 6,600 full-time students, however, Rabiya Ismail, a senior and former TCU senator, noted that more immediate and extensive measures are needed for students today.

“I don’t think that [even building] one dorm is going to be enough because if that fits 300 more students — and Tufts is enrolling another thousand [students] — I do not think that it’s sustainable for Tufts [in the long run],” Ismail said. “I think that [the university] just [needs] to build multiple dorms, maybe three dorms, to even fill how many students are on campus at this exact moment. In the future, they will have to build even more than that.”

Ismail elaborated that there have been “too many temporary solutions” for “permanent problems” such as the ongoing housing crisis, overenrollment and packed classrooms. Rossinow similarly added that while she has had a generally positive first-year experience, she is upset by how many other first-years have had a much more difficult school year.

“It’s just really unfair that we have to wait in these long lines,

The Tufts Daily is on Spotify! Scan to listen to Executive Features Editor Mark Choi reading part two of his twopart feature.

see OVERENROLLMENT, page 8

The sidechat storm: an anonymous social media application takes over Tufts campus

by Kaitlyn Wells

Deputy Features Editor

Originally published April 29, 2022.

Sidechat is arguably the hottest online development to have struck Tufts campus this year. It is a smartphone application where users can post short messages and images completely anonymously in a domain accessible to anyone with an active Tufts email account.

On Sidechat, usernames do not exist. Other features include anonymous commenting, direct messaging between users and a system of points, known on Sidechat as “karma.” This feature tallies how many times a user’s posts or comments have been upvoted or downvoted: the karma level of an individual user can only be viewed by that user. The exception to this is a public leaderboard of the top ten levels of karma that users have reached — none of which are attached to a name.

Sidechat was developed by the New York-based company Flower Ave Inc. The CEOs of Flower Ave Inc. declined the Daily’s request for an interview.

Prithvi Shahani, a first-year in the School of Engineering, is an active Sidechat user and claims to hold one of the ten highest karma rankings at Tufts Sidechat at the time of his interview with the Daily.

Shahani estimated that Sidechat surfaced at Tufts at the beginning of the Spring 2022 semester. He described how Tufts students have engaged with the platform.

“I feel like it’s just a way for people to relate with their community and share funny memes that people at Tufts can relate to, or talk about what’s currently going on, such as … recently, some Senator visited, I believe, so everyone was like, … ‘Oh, my God, Elizabeth Warren was here, oh my God, she used the washroom in the Commons,’” Shahani said.

J.P. de Ruiter, a professor in the Computer Science and Psychology departments, shared his concerns with the application’s anonymous feature, particularly as the lack of usernames on the platform disables users from verifying the continuity of the original participants.

“I’m a bit worried about [Sidechat] as a dialogue researcher because it does take away something extremely important in dialogue, which is coherence,” de Ruiter said. “Having no identity is something [different] than having anonymity. Anonymity is that there is an identity at the other end, but you don’t know where they live, and how old they are, and how they look, but there’s still a unique identity. Whereas [on Sidechat], you just also get rid of identity.”

Shahani added that it can be difficult to determine whether the contents are credible in the first place.

“Honestly, I just don’t believe anything on the app … I’ll just assume everything on the app’s a joke. That makes my life so much easier,” Shahani said.

Samuel Sommers, professor and department chair of psychology, elaborated on the implications of Sidechat’s anonymity from a psychological perspective.

GRAPHIC BY MIRIAM VODOSEK

‘unsettling the archive’ exhibit examines Tufts’ impact on the surrounding landscape

by Delaney Clarke

Managing Editor

Originally published Dec. 13, 2021.

How do institutions like Tufts come to be?

Tufts University Art Galleries’ exhibit “Unsettling the Archive: Exploring Tufts’ Relationship with Land” conveys how Tufts’ creation and ongoing expansion have impacted the environments and communities within and around its campuses.

Prior to the exhibit’s conception, Tufts University Art Galleries had been working on formulating a land acknowledgment to acknowledge that the gallery resides on the ancestral homelands of the Massachusett people and within the territories of the Nipmuc and Wamponoag tribes. However, Natalie Gearin (LA’21), former fellow of Tufts University Art Galleries, noted that both she and the gallery wished to explore the topic of land acknowledgment more extensively.

“When you acknowledge that Tufts is on Indigenous land, it brings up a lot of questions about the history of that land. … Who did the land belong to? How has the landscape evolved over time? How has Tufts intervened into it?” Gearin said.

This exhibit involves a dialogue between Tufts’ archives and contemporary perspectives, an idea that Gearin developed through having conversations with people who were also involved in discussions about land acknowledgment. To find pieces that explored Tufts’ history, Gearin worked with Pam Hopkins, Public Services and Outreach Archivist for the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives.

Hopkins outlined the process of researching through such a vast collection of archives.

“I cast a wide net to bundle as many different resources, and [to] provide context for those resources, as I can to really empower the researcher to sit down and start going through [the archives] … and it becomes this iterative, building upon, process,” Hopkins said.

Dan Santamaria, director of Digital Collections and Archives, explained the capacity that Tufts’ archives has for exploring how the university came to be.

“The university archives are … a very rich resource for people who want to understand Tufts’ past. There’s a ton of interest … in the land that Tufts was built on, how Tufts came to own that land, and building from there, how the landscape changed and how the university altered the landscape, and there’s just a ton of great resources,” Santamaria said.

Throughout the exhibit, archival research is juxtaposed with artwork from various mediums, as a means of almost carving out a new archive.

“When I was thinking about intervening in an archive, I was thinking about how can this show create a new archive, where we have videos, performances, there’s photographs, there’s paintings, there’s a mural on a building. This exhibition, in and of itself, can kind of intervene within the existing archive … it can challenge what we think an archive can be,” Gearin said.

The pieces included in the exhibit not only traverse mediums, but also time, starting with an advertisement posting from 1856 meant to “[commence] a village” around Tufts. Next to this advertisement is a portrait of Sachem of Mistick, a female Massachusett tribal leader from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, created by artist Lilly E. Manycolors. Further down the wall are artifacts and images from Royall House, an estate near Tufts’ campus on which more than 60 people were enslaved from 1739 to 1779.

There are also works from more recent history. Near the end of the exhibit is imagery depicting the expansion of the New England Medical Center, of which Tufts was a constituent. This expansion began in 1970, and over 15 years, NEMC acquired numerous buildings in the Chinatown and South Cove areas, a move that many Boston Chinatown residents were ardently opposed to.

Gearin explained that including imagery of this expansion was meant to highlight that the impact the university has on the surrounding landscape is ongoing.

“I wanted to make sure that [the exhibit] wasn’t grounded in the past and, in framing this idea, you could think of Tufts’ presence on the land as something that’s constantly changing, and really, it’s expanding,” Gearin said.

The exhibit will also soon include projects from undergraduate students in Ninian Stein’s environmental capstone course.

see EXHIBIT, page 9 Long lines, limited housing and crowded classes: Examining the effects of overenrollment

OVERENROLLMENT

continued from page 7 that we have to live in a hotel off campus, and you have such trouble registering for classes. It’s just unfair as a student that this is the place that we chose to be,” Rossinow said. “If we are getting treated like that and not seeing a change, [then], what’s the plan … [and] where is this going?”

In regards to housing, Dean of Student Affairs Camille Lizarríbar wrote to the Daily, explaining that the university “currently [does] not anticipate needing to use the Hyatt next year.” Lizarríbar also wrote that the university’s enrollment growth plan will encompass the plans “[involving] investment in housing, dining and related areas that are important for student life.”

“That work has been underway and is ongoing,” Lizarríbar wrote. “We [have already] added more than 450 on-campus beds in the last five years. That’s the equivalent of building two new dorms. … We will continue to grow our housing stock next year, and … we will be building a new dorm with 370 new beds.”

Echoing Ismail and Rossinow’s sentiment, Max Miller, a senior and trustee representative for the TCU Senate, shed light on how much the monthly rent has gone up in the host communities of Medford and Somerville, especially as the increasing undergraduate enrollment has pushed more students into off-campus housing. Miller’s sister graduated from Tufts six years ago, which gives him a reference point in his comparison.

“It’s going to be tough even for people living off campus to find [housing] options. Rent’s going up,” Miller said. “[Compared to what my sister paid] six years ago … versus what somebody in that house, I imagine, is paying now, based on what I know … I think it’s an increase of $300 in six years, per month.”

Ismail pointed out that while the university is introducing initiatives such as the initiative to make Tufts an anti-racist institution, the university’s housing policies leave much left to be desired in actualizing its goals on the ground.

“[An] anti-racism initiative does not only mean accepting more diverse groups of students, it [also] means creating equitable … practices throughout the university, and I think that includes housing,” Ismail said.

Ismail added that in the future, if Tufts were to continue to expand, the university first has to make sure that it can continue to provide quality residential undergraduate experience that encompasses many aspects of traditional college experience.

Acknowledging the many challenges that the Tufts community has faced, especially during this school year, Glaser introduced the university’s efforts to maintain its qualitative standards as the undergraduate enrollment continues to expand. Overall, Glaser elaborated that the university is currently upgrading and trying to “make sure that what we’re offering students is … really commensurate with what their expectations are [which] requires a lot of investment.”

Glaser said that the university is committed to providing quality undergraduate experience, adding that the university will “have a bumper crop of faculty” coming in for the next school year in conjunction with other institutional efforts.

“We are having a very bountiful year of faculty hiring … [and] we have the new Cummings building that has opened up, and that’s creating new space opportunities,” Glaser said. “We are sort of working our way towards that new equilibrium.”

Ultimately, Glaser is optimistic about the future of the university, its unique culture and its potential.

“I think [that] Tufts culture goes way beyond the number of students that we have,” Glaser said. “I think the culture is set by the kinds of people that we have, and the culture is defined by all kinds of things.”

Lizarríbar added that “[there] are big universities that feel intimate, and small colleges that feel vast and lonely.” She emphasized that Tufts is “a student-centered research university that has caring, connected students, faculty and staff.”

Moving forward, Ismail hopes to see a greater input from the student body in deliberating the university’s long-term enrollment plans.

“I think [the university administration needs] to put out a student climate survey, pretty immediately, because I think things have changed since the last one,” Ismail said. “There are students in hotels. … [By] doing that, they will be able to see how students actually feel, and I think also they need to really be reading those and acting on those. … I know that students voice their concerns on this survey, but I’m just not sure if they’re ever listened to.”

In the future, Lizarríbar said that there will be more opportunities for the student body to improve the undergraduate experience in general. “[We] are in the midst of creating a five-year strategic plan to explore what … opportunities we have before us,” Lizarríbar wrote. “We created a Student Advisory Group to consult with us and provide student input on both this plan and on Student Affairs in general.”

Tufts community members discuss the development and far-reaching implications of Sidechat

SIDECHAT

continued from page 7

“Being anonymous makes us feel less accountable to some of the social expectations and norms that otherwise govern our behavior. … People put things online that they would never ever say to other people in regular conversations face-to-face,” Sommers said.

Illustrating Sommers’ insight, de Ruiter cited the lyrics of Brad Paisley’s ‘Online.’

“If you just look at the lyrics you’ll see … it’s about a kind of a loser type sitting in [his parent’s basement]. But online, he’s like a superstar with a Maserati and 17 girlfriends. It’s really interesting how Brad Paisley sings about that,” de Ruiter said. “So [the song] suggests … that there can be, of course, a very big difference between people’s online personality and real personality.”

Overall, Shahani recalled that activity on Sidechat increased after the leaderboard was introduced around what he estimated to be late February to early March. He also noticed a general shift towards more discussion around controversial subject matters over time.

“At the beginning, it was pretty much really basic things like campus happenings, but people started actually making memes for the app. But at the same time, people have also started [talking about] edgy, controversial topics on the app since it’s anonymous and it can’t be linked to them,” Shahani said. “[It’s] sometimes good to have that kind of discourse but at the same time, [it’s] sometimes bad since their opinions could be harmful to the community.”

In light of this development, Sommers and de Ruiter underscored the salience of community standards and moderation for social media platforms such as Sidechat.

“It does feel like things can deteriorate on anonymous message boards to the point where they have to be moderated or they have to have some community standards in place,” Sommers said. “The kinds of bullying and kinds of problematic commentary that maybe we as a community don’t want to see … [is] always going to be at risk [on anonymous platforms].”

According to Shahani, it appears that Sidechat may hire students to act as moderators on the app. Shahani was reached out to by Sidechat to become a moderator himself. He was not interested in the role, however, and he subsequently declined the offer.

Shahani shared that he has been banned from Sidechat multiple times, ranging from about one hour to 48 hours. When users are banned from the platform, they can still access the app, upvote and downvote, but they cannot post or send direct messages, Shahani detailed.

Shahani shared his misgivings about the way moderation is carried out on Sidechat.

“I feel like they selectively choose what content they want on the platform and … that’s a really dangerous game to play because that pretty much, … could like control the narrative. … For example, I believe [there] was some sort of conflict outside of Hodgdon like a week or two ago, and they were banning people left and right for that,” Shahani said. “Otherwise, … if there were fights on the app, or people going full anti-masker back when [COVID-19] was extremely bad, they were cool with that kind of content. So, I’m not really sure what’s up with that.”

Sidechat does indeed have community guidelines, yet the only way the Daily was able to access them was through a hyperlink buried in their Terms of Service.

Brian Schaffner, Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies, first heard about Sidechat through a Slack channel of current and former students from his Public Opinion class. Schaffner suspects that self-moderation might naturally take place on Sidechat because each unique user belongs to the same institution.

“An app that’s sort of specific to one university is likely, even if it’s anonymous, … to be less problematic just because … there’s already a sense of community, like a sense of physical community here,” Schaffner said.

Moving forward, Schaffner added that Sidechat has the potential to shape wider campus public opinion as the application continues to become more popular among Tufts students.

“People probably go on [Sidechat] to feel some sense of validation, … [which] can probably help to crystallize opinion, I guess, in a more aggregate way. … I think that would have an effect on public opinion in a way that might matter beyond the app,” Schaffner said.

As Sidechat is still in the early stages of development, its users are the primary determinants of the ways in which students will engage on the forum. Sommers underscored the responsibility of the application’s users in this context.

“What I would suggest is that if people feel like an anonymous platform like this is a useful part of the Tufts conversation, then, you know, use it for good,” Sommers said. “I’m skeptical because sometimes these things don’t go [in] that direction. But hopefully we can make the best of this platform while it’s around and have it be a plus for the university and not … a source of stress or disparagement.”

Tufts art exhibit traces the university’s history and its interconnectedness to indigenous culture, local environment

“Unsettling the Archive: Exploring Tufts’ Relationships with Land” at Tufts University Art Galleries.

COURTESY JULIA FEATHERINGILL

EXHIBIT

continued from page 8

According to Stein, who is a lecturer in environmental studies and anthropology, the capstone projects are intended to think about the concept of institutional change — how people influence and communicate, and how people change institutions from within and from outside.

Communication is a key area of Stein’s research and teaching. Each year, she brings students from her “Environment, Communication, and Culture” class to the galleries, so that they may explore art as a medium of communication for difficult topics.

Stein described the power of artwork to raise awareness around certain issues.

“I think art is a very potent way to communicate around hard topics … and is a wonderful way to think through different ways that we can receive and communicate messages,” Stein said.

One component of the exhibit is found outside the gallery. This is “Wapka,” a mural that was created by Erin Genia, an artist and lecturer in the sculpture and performance department at the SMFA.

Bright and beautiful, “Wapka” is an image of the Mystic River overlaid with images of the Anpa O Wicahnpi — Morningstar — which is Dakota imagery. Genia is a Dakota person, a member of the SissetonWahpeton Oyate/Odawa, and she includes the Morningstar symbol in many of her pieces. Genia used this symbol within “Wapka” to present an Indigenous perspective on the river. This mural was commissioned by Abigail Satinsky, an art curator at the SMFA.

The Mystic River has close ties to Tufts’ history. According to Hopkins, Charles Tufts was a descendant of Peter Tufts, who made money in the brick trade, an industry that took clay from the river, and owned extensive farmland in the area.

Genia hopes that “Wapka” and the other pieces included in the exhibit will inspire people to understand more about various Indigenous philosophies and think more critically about the history of different lands.

“I just wanted to share that Native peoples’ philosophies are really important,” Genia said. “I think people need to understand a lot more about Native people … and also the history of places. The history that [children] are taught about this place is a whitewashed history that doesn’t adequately give the facts.”

Gearin noted that she wants visitors to understand that the process of forming an institution like Tufts is not fluid, and instead leaves a complex and lasting impact on the landscape.

“I guess the thesis of the exhibition is that Tufts and its campuses are not this organic entity that just appeared. [Tufts] hasn’t just naturally coalesced over time,” Gearin said. “I’d also really like to people to come away with the idea that the idea of settlement, the idea of presence and of expansion on the landscape, is ongoing, it can take many forms and [it] impacts all different kinds of people in multiple ways.”