This week we were supposed to embark on a Livable Futures field school. We designed the program, called This Land: A Feminist Ohio Field School, to foreground a collective process of grappling with how students and teachers at OSU are situated within the legacies and contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism in Ohio. At the heart of the course’s objectives was a commitment to learn about and understand how settler colonialism continues to shape everyday lives and learning in Ohio, even as we all have unique positions within these legacies through our own personal histories, identities, and locations. While the trip and community learning was cancelled due to COVID-19, here we share some of the ideas and questions that informed the development of the field school as a way to spur reflection on indigenous lives, settler debt, and land use - and what this moment of crisis during the pandemic reveals about the demands we all must make for livable futures.
Photo credit R.D. Smith
Settler Colonialism
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which land occupation and permanent migration of colonists occurs; it is not a past event, but continues to this day. Settler colonialism continues through land occupation and use, for instance by establishing ideas of who belongs in “this land is our land” through stories of land conquest and manifest destiny in American history. As Cherokee writer and advocate Rebecca Nagle chronicles as host of the podcast This Land, grappling with settler colonialism asks that we recognize that American identity was forged through land grabs, war, genocide, and broken treaties. The myth of the American settler rests on erasing these violences as past, while celebrations of settling the continent and nation through fortitude, grit, and family life endure. Thus, settler colonialism erases Native life in the present and through processes like national identity and private land ownership, and establishes settler formations of family, land use, and identity as rightfully located here.
Native struggles for sovereignty continue here and now, in Ohio and throughout the U.S. In North America - what indigenous people call Turtle Island. The removal of Native people from their land and the ongoing control of that land remain central components to settler colonialism, as seen in many recent struggles against oil and gas extraction and pipeline construction. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe withstood police attacks, tear gas, and arrests in the hundreds as they and their allies peacefully protested their infringed water rights. As Kyle Powys Whyte, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, explains, the settler motivation for taking and managing land includes but goes beyond the “usefulness” of land (such as the extraction of natural resources and property values). Settler colonialism seeks to decimate tribal ways of life and ultimately erase Native existence through ongoing displacement, removal, assimilation, and warfare. The decolonial resistance of Native people in this instance is more than about protecting their local water rights - it is about indigenous survival, sovereignty, and environmental justice.
“One question we wanted to face through our Ohio Field School is how members of the OSU community respond to or recognize the settler debts incurred by colonialism. ”
Land-Grant Institution
In Ohio, we live on lands claimed by tribes speaking Algonquian and Iroquois languages. The Shawnee were one of the largest groups in Ohio at the time of European incursion. Many other groups indigenous to the continent of Turtle Island came to this region (Ohio) as European settlers pushed them off their lands – some as early as the 1600s. These include the Miami, Delaware (Lenape), Ottawa, Seneca (who came to be Seneca-Cayuga), and Wyandot. The names of these tribes are sutured to the everyday in Ohio, as the name of towns, schools, rivers, and the like. Yet, those not native to this area are not forced to reckon with that heritage or, for example, the pain of one’s tribal affiliation and identity being used as a mascot. That history and its force on the present are often “hidden in plain sight.”
Old University Hall. Wikimedia Commons
As members of the Buckeye community, we are entangled in settler colonialism regardless of our political affiliations or racial-ethnic identities. The land upon which the University sits and from which property values accrue was made possible by a land-grant system established by the Morrill Act of 1862. While land-grant universities like OSU herald this origin as central to the mission of the University to serve the educational needs of the people of Ohio, there is little reflection on the significance of the Morrill Act as an ethical demand on the present, not to mention who the people of Ohio are and have been. The land grants were provided by the federal government and that financial support endowed flagship universities in many states. There is no denying that along with the many important achievements of The Ohio State University, as an institution, OSU is a product of settler colonialism. The University remains financially and ethically indebted to the violence and privileges of settler colonialism.
One question we wanted to face through our Ohio Field School is how members of the OSU community respond to or recognize the settler debts incurred by colonialism. There are no easy or simple answers or singular positions to this question, but there are examples that can lead the way forward. Some universities and university groups have taken up this question in ways that directly confront the legacy and present conditions of settlerism. We can follow these paths and learn to educate ourselves - about the history of OSU on indigenous land, about how we do and don’t learn about Native life in the present (and not just as a blip in long-ago American history), how Native students, faculty, and staff exist as Buckeyes, too, and how we might integrate indigenous lessons throughout our curricula and campus environmental practices.
Feminists have long theorized the importance of how one is socially and culturally situated in terms of gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, ethnicity, class, and ability. As faculty in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, we believe that we can do the work of answering the questions above individually and collectively, including recognizing that being situated anywhere in the United States includes histories and current practices of settler colonialism. In addition to educating ourselves and demanding that the university be proactively forthright about settler debt, the perspectives and demands of Indigenous students and staff right now offer vital lessons for campus.
Decolonizing the Present and the Future
As Ohio State University celebrates its sesquicentennial this year, there is much fanfare about the land-grant university in the 21st century. Indeed, in our current moment of severe budgetary constraints due to the pandemic, the merits of publicly supported higher education will be at the front of many of our minds. Amidst the calls and lobbying to ensure the future of the land-grant university, there should also be a 21st century acknowledgement of the long incurring debt on which the University’s success rests and upon which it continues to draw. The future of the University is not separate from its past. In fact, the future has always been a temporality of settler colonialism -- the idea of agricultural and industrial progress, manifest destiny, discovery, and terra nullis are all rooted in projecting certain lives and ways of living into the future.
The current public health crisis has brought many of the pathologies of settler colonialism into plain sight, including the reality that growth and settler futurity are fundamentally not sustainable. The populations that are the hardest hit by the virus are Indigenous tribes and communities of color. Here at the Livable Futures project, we are asking pointed questions about whose lives are deemed more livable than others, whose environmental and land practices are elevated above others, whose bodies are celebrated and given care - and whose aren’t. The work of decolonizing OSU belongs to all of us. Our perspective on This Land is to insist that we learn how to understand our campus, its many communities’ relations to land, and its contemporary legacies in Ohio - to continue that quest.
This Land: A Feminist Ohio Field School was co-created by WGSS Associate Professors Jennifer Suchland and Mary Thomas.
