Recorded: 

Curated Track: 

Sara Smith, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

Description:

What does landback mean at a university? How do we work for abolition when we study and work at institutions built by the labor of people who were enslaved? The Landback Abolition Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has brought together students, faculty, and staff to grapple with what landback and abolition, repair, rematriation, and reparations might mean in the context of this university. In the archives, and traversing campus, we have taken up the principles of land education to collectively study our institution’s historic and present relationship to Indigenous dispossession, Black enslavement, and their afterlives. Over the last decade we have witnessed how these histories continue to structure our present through this institution’s responses (or lack thereof) to the demands of Black and Native students. In the past year, these issues have only become more pressing as our campuses have been transformed in response to students, staff, and faculty standing in solidarity with Palestine—adding to the history of universities as sites of political action and conservative re-entrenchment. We have been thinking about these issues through the lenses of land-as-pedagogy (Simpson 2014; Goeman 2015; McCoy, Tuck, and McKenzie 2016; Tuck et al. 2013) and racial capitalism (Lowe 2015; Robinson 1983; Johnson and Lubin 2017), together with other Black, Indigenous, and anticolonial scholarship, as well as critical scholarship on universities (Lee and Ahtone 2020; Ambo and Rocha Beardall 2023; Brayboy and Tachine 2021; Wilder 2013; Baldwin 2021; Daigle 2019; Singh and Vora 2023). As a practice, we have been engaging with community conversations, and reorganizing our teaching to begin from our land and make space for students to research the university itself.

We welcome you into this conversation – how are you taking up these questions at your universities? How do you avoid “decolonization as metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012)? How do you sustain this work during a period of conservative re-entrenchment, Diversity and Inclusion bans, and the ongoing backlash against critical engagement with history? In this session, we hope to build on conversations from prior AAG conferences to build a community of scholars working toward our long-term goals of sovereignty and liberation. If you are engaging in this kind of work at your university, please join us!

References
Ambo, Theresa, and Theresa Rocha Beardall. 2023. “Performance or Progress? The Physical and Rhetorical Removal of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Land Acknowledgments at Land-Grab Universities.” American Educational Research Journal 60 (1): 103–40.
Baldwin, Davarian L. 2021. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. New York: Bold Type Books.
Brayboy, Bryan McKinley Jones, and Amanda R Tachine. 2021. “Myths, Erasure, and Violence: The Immoral Triad of the Morrill Act.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8 (1): 139–44.
Daigle, Michelle. 2019. “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37 (4): 703–21.
Goeman, Mishuana. 2015. “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment.” In Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja, 71–89. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Johnson, Gaye Theresa, and Alex Lubin. 2017. “Introduction.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin. New York City: Verso Books.
Lee, Robert, and Tristan Ahtone. 2020. “Land-Grab Universities.” High Country News, March 30, 2020. https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities.
Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McCoy, Kate, Eve Tuck, and Marcia McKenzie. 2016. Land Education: Rethinking Pedagogies of Place from Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives. New York: Routledge.
Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2014. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): 1–25.
Singh, Vineeta, and Neha Vora. 2023. “Critical University Studies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 52.
Tuck, Eve, Mistinguette Smith, Allison M Guess, Tavia Benjamin, and Brian K Jones. 2013. “Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 3 (1): 52–74.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.
Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Non-Presenting Participants