Creating Places for Indigenous Community

The Beginning of Something: Kelly lecturer shares her vision

BY MANISHA JHA

FIVE YEARS AGO, - Intellectual House opened its doors as a home at the University of Washington for Native students, scholars and Indigenous peoples from around the region and the world.

It was born out of a grand vision of “indigenizing the University” by weaving Native understanding into the fabric of campus through enrollment, scholarship and teaching. Now Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/ Nuu-chah-nulth), the American Indian Studies associate professor who chaired the advisory committee for - Intellectiual House, offers a vision for the future of that work as this year’s Samuel E. Kelly Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. While the lecture was cancelled due to coronavirus concerns, the ideas behind the talk continue to resonate.

Physically, - Intellectiual House is a longhouse-style building between the Quad and MacMahon Hall—but the structure is much more than a gathering place. It’s part of a larger process to create community among Indigenous faculty, staff and students and catalyze a network of Indigenous communities across academia and beyond, Coté says.

Through events like the annual “Living Breath of ” Indigenous Foods and Ecological Knowledge Symposium, founded by Coté, people from Indigenous communities around the globe are drawn to Seattle to be connected. Maori people from New Zealand participated in last year’s event and are planning to return. Coté is a food scholar, and her research relates directly to healing injustices through community-building around food.

So what exactly does indigenizing the UW mean? It means including the perspectives of Indigenous students, faculty and staff into the larger curriculum, Coté says. “My hope is that the UW will see the as a starting point … and through respectful dialogue we can begin to break down academic institutional barriers, and Indigenous voices will be included and welcomed in the development of institutional policies, procedure and practices. Charlotte Coté

MAKING A PLACE, CLAIMING THE CAMPUS,

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” Coté says. “I think this is just the beginning of something that could create a really important change on campus as long as the University itself wants to see that change.”

While there has been some rise in Indigenous student enrollment since Coté joined faculty in 2001, she hopes that growth trend continues. Indigenous students need to see adequate representation in the UW staff—every department needs Indigenous faculty, not just American Indian Studies, which has itself dropped in number of Native American faculty by 50% in the last two decades, mostly because of retirements, she says.

But “it’s not just about building relationships on campus,” Coté says. “It’s about bringing health and wellness and indigenizing together.” This is part of her ongoing research and her latest project—a book she has been working on since she published "Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions" in 2010.

Her new book aims to extrapolate theory from narrative. Coté describes her work as less like academic discourse and more like returning home: While other scholars might call her methods “community-based participation,” Coté views them as just “talking around a table.” The book will examine the restoration of health and wellness in Northwest Indigenous communities and the centrality of food.

Last fall, architects Jim Nicholls and Daniel Glenn (Apsáalooke (Crow)), an expert in culturally responsible architecture, led a graduate-level studio focused on decolonization. The seminar connected students with members of the Native American community to design Native student housing and community space on campus. Second-year graduate student Steven Moehring, who designed the concept on the left, said: “The architecture is meant to act as a way for Indigenous values to re-manifest themselves as a strong and tangible reclamation of the site.”

IMAGINING MORE

CREATING PLACES AND SPACES FOR INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY AT UW

Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies Gains Grant

BY KIM ECKART

The UW Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, which was established in 2018, now has funding for four years of Native student support, academics, research and cultural programs. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation granted $1.8 million to the center last fall to support both students and research.

“We spent the first year planning the center from the ground up, meeting with Native faculty, students, staff and community research partners across the UW campuses,” says co-director Jean Dennison (Osage Nation), an associate professor of American Indian Studies. “We envisioned creating strong communities where we can support and learn from each other. This Mellon grant will go a long way in helping us reengineer the University to meet these needs.”

The New York-based Mellon Foundation, which supports the humanities in higher education and the arts, awarded the grant in recognition of UW’s potential to be a leader among universities in the growing field of Indigenous Studies.

The center brings together faculty and students in American Indian and Indigenous studies, an interdisciplinary field of research that traverses the social sciences, arts and humanities, education and natural sciences. Nearly a dozen units, including the Provost’s Office, the Graduate School, UW Libraries, UW Tacoma and UW Bothell, contributed to the initial funding of the center and related activities, a total of more than $1 million over five years. The center has a deans’ advisory board as well as an overall advisory board of Native undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff and community partners.

American Indian, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students make up about 1% of undergraduates at the UW, and 0.4% of the faculty. That underrepresentation could change with an environment that supports staffing and activities focused on the Native community, says Rickey Hall, vice president for the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity and University diversity officer.

With the new grant, the center can continue an existing seminar for graduate students—the Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities—and create five new programs for undergraduates, graduates and transfer students. This includes a Native UW Scholars Program for incoming freshmen that will partner with the - Intellectual House to host a one-week residential experience in the summer, an orientation program with parents, a yearlong seminar and peer mentorships.

“The Mellon grant will allow us to better leverage the UW’s existing infrastructure for connecting with Native communities; supporting Native students, staff and faculty; and producing innovative scholarship in the expanding field of Indigenous studies,” says Chadwick Allen (Chickasaw ancestry), the center’s other co-director, professor of English and associate vice provost for faculty advancement.

“Central to our goal of fostering Indigenous communities at the UW is creating a space in which Native knowledge, especially the languages, can thrive,” Dennison says.

The funding also provides for a new residency program to bring Native specialists to the UW’s campuses to teach in the Department of American Indian Studies, host regular knowledge tables, supervise research projects, offer lectures and workshops, and develop curricula. The department will also build partnerships with Indian-education programs to create pathways for Native students to attend the University and to graduate.

Tami Hohn of the Puyallup Tribe was the first resident specialist. She lectured and shared her expertise in Southern Lushootseed, a language of Coast Salish tribes including the Muckleshoot, Puyallup and Suquamish.

“The UW and our partners are now at a point where we can do more than simply reach out to communities that have been marginalized and underserved,” Allen says. “We can actually begin to transform academic space across disciplines, working to create supportive ecosystems in which Indigenous peoples and our relations can thrive.”