American Indian Studies Program

This presentation examines the entangled histories of Indigenous land dispossession, the founding of the land-grant university system, and epistemicide in settler colonial institutions. Building on the Land-Grab Universities and Misplaced Trust investigations, and drawing from current efforts by the Trump administration to eliminate diversity initiatives at U.S. institutions, this talk draws a direct line between the violent expropriation of Indigenous territories to the erasure of Indigenous peoples on campuses and in American institutions at large, ultimately arguing that ideas of academic freedom cannot be disentangled from questions of historic justice and decolonial action.

Tristan Ahtone (member of the Kiowa Tribe) is Editor at Large at Grist

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Spring Lecture Series
At Risk U: The Past, Present, and Future of Academic Freedom