[somber music] Being part of Penn State has been a quandary for me as I've been grateful for the opportunities that it's presented.

But it's also a poignant reminder that I, like all of you, or most of you I should say, are visitors to this land and we are missing its original stewards, who, by the way, aren't gone, they're living and breathing just in Oklahoma and New York and wherever else the US government placed them other than here.

Land acknowledgments contextualize why we gather and are here on these lands.

Our metaphysics points to the importance of being in relationship.

We understand beauty through relationship.

We understand what is good and bad through relationship.

Humans, animals, plants, all of nature, the wind, the Moon, the sun, all those things are all parts of our world.

When I say [non-english],, that means I'm from Navajo land.

So when we think about the land, that's an entity that we're in relationship with.

From an Indigenous perspective or a part of it, it has spiritual aspects to it, whereas a Western philosophy is often that we're superior to it and it's here for us.

Being Indigenous is being native to a specific place.

Indigenous means different things to different groups.

We're often using it to convey a much more global term for Indigenous peoples around the world.

I think when it's used by individuals it's often used to convey certain kinds of solidarity with those communities.

I'm Indigenous to North America, and so that means that's where my people have come from.

Other people in other contexts, it's easier to say Indigenous to the lands.

Then we have an idea of who they are.

And then there's different histories that have people identifying in different ways.

So in different countries they might be first nations or first peoples, those types of things.

So Indigenous peoples does kind of point to that global context.

The word "Indigenous" is an increasingly layered and sometimes fraught term.

That word like all English words are very much shaped by history and colonialism.

What the word "Indigenous" means depends very much on the context, and it can be deployed to stake a claim on belonging or on resources or on recognition.

So it's a complex matter what indigeneity means.

Indigenous is a term that is in opposition to the term "colonizer."

There were different forms of colonialism that existed in early America.

One example would be the Spanish mission system.

Another kind of colonialism that you have is the extraction of natural resources.

And you can see this most prominently in terms of the fur trade.

These kinds of colonialism depend on the presence, and to some degree, the cooperation of Native people.

The major difference with settler colonialism is that settlers want Indigenous people out of the way.

The idea in settler colonialism is to destroy or remove Indigenous people and replace them with a colonizing population.

That is a very different kind of enterprise than some of the other kinds of colonialism that you see.

There are Indigenous societies in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand who have all experienced settler colonialism.

It tended to be especially prominent in British imperialism.

And those people share a lot in common because of those colonized experiences.

When we think of North America and when we think of Australia and New Zealand, it becomes pretty obvious who is Indigenous to those places.

South Africa gets really, really tricky.

And I think it gets tricky because there are so many different cultural groups.

The Xhosas, the Zulus, the Ndebele, the Tsonga, the Venda, the Khoi, the San.

There are degrees of differences and nuances within those groupings.

And this group gets conflated or basically homogenized as one racial category.

And that categorization then eclipses the Indigenous ties and results in a kind of political identity.

In South Africa, the k-word is "kaffir."

And I say it out loud because actually while under apartheid and during the colonial period this was a word of extreme racial violence that literally permitted violence to be enacted against Black bodies.

That word is taken out by the Portuguese and later by the Dutch and the English to speak about and to designate contemptible meanings.

I think most people know about South Africa because of apartheid which was a system of legislated racial discrimination that was instituted in 1948.

So, at that time, all South Africans were classified racially into three categories, white, colored, Native.

So that word Native is very much tied up into a political designation that actually meant that Native people were removed from their citizenship.

So both Native as in carrying all the meanings of that word and at the same time excluded from belonging.

And this ambivalence in the word Native and Indigenous and African can be traced back through before apartheid and into the colonial period as well.

[non-english speech] Inform his lordship we've found what he's looking for.

Because white settlers in South Africa encountered an anterior Black presence, in other words, the existence and presence of Black people in the land before white settlers arrived, in order for white settlers to claim belonging and ownership of that land, they had to do something about the belonging of Black people to the land.

And so one of the strategies for that is to turn nativeness of Black people into something completely contemptible.

Part of the political discourse is that a lot of the land reform has fallen in a way that completely overlooks the true then Indigenous people of South Africa.

And so then there becomes a debate about what it means to be truly South African.

In the course of the 19th century, this growing contempt that was attached to the meaning of nativeness, Black people's nativeness, helped again to remove the sense of natural belonging between Black people and land.

And that had led to a process of dispossession deepened by what apartheid does.

Americans were very ambitious and they saw themselves expanding from sea to sea.

So certainly Anglo-Americans and in their project of building what would become the United States was a settler colonial project from the very beginning.

The United States initially just assumed that it was going to be able to seize these territories, many of which were still firmly in Indigenous hands.

So the United States in the decade after the American Revolution undertook a series of armed conflicts with Native people.

These were pretty disastrous for the United States.

Even on the heels of the American victory in the revolution, this is still a situation where Native peoples still largely outnumber settlers.

Americans understand they can't impose their will on Native tribes any more than the British could.

They still have to go to the negotiating table and they do that by late 1770s with the Delaware, and then in the 1780s write a series of treaties with other Native nations.

There are really two competing impulses in early US Indian policy.

On the one hand, there was something called the civilization program or the civilization policy.

This was an idea of assimilating Native people essentially remaking them in the image of whites.

Here then was another solution to the Indian problem.

Teach them contempt for the things they had which were of value and to covet the things they didn't need.

The idea with this policy was that eventually frontier whites and Native peoples would become very culturally similar, they would intermarry, and that Native nations would voluntarily give up their territorial claims and their sovereignty.

This is what us policymakers imagined.

This did not happen.

On the other side of this, there's a policy of removal.

Removal policy was seen as a rejection of civilization policy.

It was implemented under Andrew Jackson's first administration and it was really the cornerstone of his domestic policy.

Within the wider US, but also within Native nations, ideas on race are changing.

And so if you, in fact, have ideas about race that suggest that people are innately different and in fact they're different because of their race then they can't integrate fully into this larger American project.

And so removal reflects some of those more hardening racialized ideas that in fact Native peoples are different and they cannot live side by side with civilized white people.

And so the Indian Removal policy is the manifestation of that.

Once Andrew Jackson is elected to office in 28 he immediately passes the Indian Removal Act which ultimately leads both to a range of problematic treaties but also violent and devastating outcomes for Native people.

When the first white man came over the wide waters, he was but a little man.

Very little.

His legs were cramped by sitting long in his big boat and he begged for a little land.

Now he says the land you live upon is not yours.

Go beyond the Mississippi.

There you may remain while the grass grows and the rivers flow.

The most famous example of this is the example of the Cherokee Nation.

The United States federal government deployed the armed forces who forcibly removed Cherokees from their homes, sometimes not even allowed to collect any provisions or any extra clothing.

And they were held in stockades oftentimes for months while the United States government prepared to deport them westward to Indian territory, what is now Oklahoma.

Cherokee removal was extremely violent, it was also undertaken without any regard for what we would call human rights today.

Probably a quarter of the Cherokee population died during the Trail of Tears or in its immediate aftermath.

And we know that it continued to affect Indigenous health and mortality for generations because it was so traumatic and so violent.

This isn't just a policy that affects southeastern people, it's affecting Native people throughout what are the boundaries of the United States at that moment.

It's waves of displacement.

When you're displacing people or forcing them into spaces that are not those from which they come, there's a disconnection that happens.

It's a bigger displacement than just land when Cherokee people were displaced to what is today Oklahoma.

33% of the medicinal plants that grew in the East in the Appalachian region didn't grow in what is today Oklahoma.

That's a loss of medicine.

That's a loss of key ceremonial pieces of your world.

So you've not only displaced people but you've taken them and removed them from the very things that they need to heal spiritually and physically and that has an impact, that has a deeper and longer term impact than just the event itself.

And so I think we've got to think deeply about these kind of larger knowledges and also cosmological systems and spiritual systems that are in place that are then damaged as well.

And so when you are displacing people that is a brutal and violent event in and of itself to then deprive those same peoples of the very things they need to heal is a second kind of violence.

Education was and still is one of the weapons used to assimilate Indigenous peoples.

And so we can have them think like us and then they'll be willing to sell their land and not be so attached to it and then they'll just want to be a part of the economy as we see it.

Determined to save the Indian by de-Indianizing him, the good people from the East decided to concentrate on the children.

Native North Americans have such incredibly diverse histories and cultures but residential schools are one of the things that they all share.

They all have ancestors, sometimes living relatives who survived these residential schools, and so it is part of this shared experience of dealing with settler colonialism.

Most of these schools are referred to as federal Indian boarding schools.

These schools came into being at the hands of a man named Richard Henry Pratt who was a notorious Indian fighter in his own right.

The intent of federal Indian boarding schools was simply to assimilate Native children to be like white people in the United States.

It was meant to destroy Native culture.

Complained the father of one homesick scholar, they gave him a white man's name he could not say.

And hard moccasins that hurt his feet.

And they cut his hair short to shame him.

My son will have to learn all over again how to be an Indian when he returns to my lodge.

The goal of them was to separate families from their kids because they wanted the kids to not have anything to do with what it meant to be Indigenous, because that was meaning being attached to the land.

And so it's always about the land in a settler colonialist perspective.

And that has had really negative effects for Indigenous communities.

Students were learning how to be white when they never really could be.

They were never going to be valued in the same ways that white people were.

They might think like that and be assimilated and be Christian, but they're still now then a racialized minority in the United States.

And when people return to their communities, they usually didn't have the skills to do well in those communities.

And so it was just kind of this space where people had to come to understandings of who they were.

Were they Indigenous?

Were they white?

It disrupted our relationships, it disrupted our languages, it disrupted our life ways.

The Carlisle Indian Boarding School was an experiment that happened right here in Pennsylvania, and it was a military school.

And so their goal was to separate Indigenous students from their families.

Children taken as young as four years old and won't go home until they're 18.

One of Carlisle's major interventions is kind of this militarization of training for Native men.

So Carlisle requires boys to do military drills it's requiring boys to wear uniforms that very much look like military uniforms.

It's requiring young Native boys and older boys to cut their hair in the same styles that American men do, which of course has profound cultural and spiritual implications for those Native men where hair is tied to other kinds of cosmological and spiritual systems.

Carlisle is notorious because of its size and longevity, but boarding schools broadly are notorious because often it was a death sentence and it was another loss for native peoples relative to their future, that when you take children you're taking people's future, and that's exactly what boarding schools did.

Many of these children never made it home as a result of being taken thousands of miles away from their Native homelands and from their communities.

And this system operated really from the late 1870s through mid-century in the 20th century.

This intentional targeting and removal of Native children to achieve the goal of forced assimilation was both traumatic and violent.

The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies were inflicted on generations of children, some as young as four.

People say, oh, that happened in the past.

Just move on just forget about it.

Let's just try to think positive and move forward.

But it has to be understood that that's where all the trauma and harm started.

And so when we think about those children being taken from their communities, put into these boarding schools, disconnected from their homes, disconnected from their lands, being raised in a military style environment, they went home, they grew up, they had children, they became parents that didn't know how to parent.

So all of that has a lot of devastating implications that continue today.

For those of us who are connected to our communities, that we can tell you exactly who the last person to attend a boarding school in our family is.

For me, this was my biological grandfather.

That my dad's father attended a boarding school.

My great aunts many of my great uncles attended boarding schools.

It doesn't take much to figure out the legacies of boarding schools in your own family.

So when we think about those disconnections and those disruptions and the harm that has been done from boarding schools and assimilative education it really drives the work that we're doing with the net character development.

It's always a collective way of understanding the world.

So we're not trying to fix the academics and then try to fix the youth, we're saying, no, let's make sure our youth are healthy from a dinette perspective, and then they'll do all these great things.

So the Diné character building is really about supporting our students to be healthy Diné in their identities and understand what that means.

What success looks like for those curriculum programs I'm working with is that the youth of our communities thrive as Indigenous people with their identities intact, with their holistic selves healthy.

They're speaking the languages.

They're knowing their clans.

They're knowing their families.

They're advocating for the lands because they understand that relationship.

There's work to be done to take care of our ourselves and our families.

I think there is a huge amount of unacknowledged pain, a very contested sense of a relation to being a South African.

I think we're complicated people as a result.

We have a lot of work to do to not live out and embody all of those damaging meanings and all of those damaging histories.

And one way to do that is to look more honestly at the past.

As we think through some of the kind of real crises of our moment, they're going to have to be some real reckonings around kind of holistic responses to many of the issues we face, and that Indigenous knowledges come from long studied understandings of place.

What's left out of the conversation are Indigenous ways of knowing.

So Native people have been doing things like practicing medicine, practicing science, practicing agriculture for millennia in North America.

They have incredibly rich histories and cultures and they form a vital part of the American past, but also the American future.

So I think those points of view have to be taken into consideration.

Through more collaborative models and through thinking about deep knowledges that Indigenous peoples have, that in fact, we could come up with some really creative solutions to questions of climate change and adaptation, how we manage water shortages across this country, alternative energies.

These are not conversations that we should be having separately, but I think that we've got to consider alternative ways of reckoning holistic responses to these questions and concerns that Indigenous peoples in fact have perspectives and views on that are meaningful and potentially helpful to this moment we're in.

I'm not sure we are ready to hear what Indigenous ways of being are telling us.

So what might it mean to live in a way that makes life possible.

And not just our own self-indulgent life, but the life of everyone including the life of the future.

So I think the labor is ours and the lessons that indigeneity teaches us are already here.

We have simply made them irretrievable, despised, forgotten, inaccessible.

And once we change ourselves, I think our ability to understand and to and to practice those ways that's when we will truly understand them.

[non-english speech] [somber music]