Recognition and repair
In Fall of 2021, I returned to MIT (where I earned an S.B. in ’07) to begin a conversation about the ongoing legacy of MIT’s participation in the erasure and genocide of American Indian peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries. Conversations in 21H.283, the “Indigenous History of MIT” course that I am teaching this year, have been raw and, at times, overwhelming. I have cried and laughed… and everything in between. The archival and ethnographic research that my students and I are undertaking begins with recognizing the fact that MIT was funded by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. The Morrill Acts, written and introduced by Justin Smith Morrill, a US Senator from Vermont, put in action a set of economic processes by which lands dispossessed from American Indian nations across the continent were used to established land-grant and sea-grant (what some of us now call “land-grab”) universities. MIT is the direct beneficiary of stolen Native American lands. While we at MIT today are a long way from meaningful relationships with these nations, I continue to call for MIT to place its resources (both monetary and human) into the work of healing and recompense.
On a zoom call with former Provost Schmidt, I was asked what it would mean if MIT, overnight, centered Indigenous peoples and placed resources into Indigenous-centered scholarship. I told him that it is imperative that we deal with injustices done to Indigenous peoples during the rise of MIT. Consider, more than a century later, where we are with emerging conversations about climate change. If we attempt to repair the planet without first seeing that climate change is rooted in processes that have long utilized and destroyed the wealth of American Indian peoples, our work will be compromised and limited.
MIT is the ideal place to have this conversation. In the late 1990s, the MIT Physics Department used to give exams on the second floor of Walker Memorial building. I used to tell my fellow students and the faculty in Physics that the building felt odd — even possessed. As it happens, the building is named after MIT’s third president Francis Walker who, among other things, directed the establishment of reservations for American Indians in the United States and published a book in 1874 titled The Indian Question, in which he asked, “What shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress?” It was as if I, as a member of the Lumbee Tribe, was never supposed to be here.
However, now as I begin to pull back the curtain on a university that is regularly ranked among the best in the world, I realize that my storytelling at MIT is about much more than one institution. It is about how an economy of eradicating American Indian people has become capital for the economy of science and technology in the United States and across the world. You would have no Raytheon without Indian genocide. You would have no Silicon Valley without Indian genocide.
That is what makes our upcoming Indigenous Earth Day events so remarkable. After centuries of roadways, gadgets, and high speed everything ran roughshod over Indigenous lands and peoples, those same peoples are returning to MIT to sit down in its most sacred spaces — which are really the sacred spaces of Massachusett peoples — and speak truth to power with a community of mostly non-Indigenous peoples.
At this moment, we wait for MIT’s executives to issue a statement about the Institute’s responsibilities to address its part in the business of eradicating and stealing from American Indian communities across the United States. While we wait, we must remind ourselves of why we are here and how we got here, and why we remain. Stolen American Indian land and the suppression of Indigenous bodies and knowledge became the seed money — the capital — for industry, environmental disaster, and now climate change. This capital must be returned. (Some of our peer institutions are increasingly involved in this recompense work.)
Moreover, we must all become more invested in storytelling that changes how everyone views the world — storytelling that turns our collective consciousness toward justice for Indigenous peoples. This brief documentary video offers an example.
Listen to David Shane Lowry on the podcast, Wisdom Continuum, with Leah Lemm and Daniel Lemm.