BUZZ
Univ. needs to ‘continue to increase the quality of [its] communication with the Narragansett tribal government’
Several faculty affiliated with Brown University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative say the school’s “updated frameworks” regarding assurances to Indigenous peoples are “not entirely satisfactory.”
Four years ago, Brown officially established a land acknowledgment and several “commitments” which “recogniz[e] the University’s location ‘on lands that are within the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.’”
The commitments include “support [of] new original scholarship regarding the origins and founding of [the] University and its relationships to the Indigenous peoples,” and “working closely” with the Narragansett tribe to “explore how Brown can effectively honor and memorialize” its original homeland.
As reported by The Brown Daily Herald‘s “affinity and identity” writer, back in May Swearer Center for Public Service Executive Director Mary Jo Callan noted several “new initiatives” to be undertaken, including a “concentration in Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies” and “repatriation of ancestral remains and belongings.”
Callan also noted specific measures taken by Brown related to the original five commitments, such as a “faculty-led research project [which] examines forms of spatial and symbolic violence in settler colonial cities [like] Providence that contributed to the erasure of Indigenous modernity.”
But the center’s endawnis Spears (pictured), a “practitioner in residence for tribal engagement” who works “to continue the process of ‘reconfiguring systems of knowledge and access’ in just and reciprocal ways with acknowledgment of the tapestry of Indigenous experiences,” said she believes “there is more work to be done on the commissioning side” — such as more funding within the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, or NAISI.
Spears added that Brown needs to “continue to increase the quality of [its] communication with the Narragansett tribal government.”
According to a past Swearer news release, Spears welcomes all non-Native members of the Brown University community interested in “tribal engagement” with the Narragansett and other tribes to embark on “a journey of cultural humility.”
History Professor Linford Fisher, an NAISI-affiliated faculty member, told The Herald he’d like to see an “in-depth project” regarding Native Americans similar to the school’s 2006 Slavery and Justice Report, and noted the commitment updates were “expanded and more generalized.”
Fisher also expressed “concern” the updates didn’t specifically mention the Narragansett, as did Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies Professor Mack Scott, an “enrolled member” of the Narragansett tribe who specializes in the “intersections of indigeneity, race, memory, and futurity.”
Brown spokesman Brian Clark told The Herald the university “recognize[s] that fulfilling [its] commitments and achieving a strong relationship with Indigenous communities in New England, nationally and globally is a long-term endeavor.”
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