Photo by Jenny Yu '24. The Zowie Banteah Cultural Center shares a building with the Ellana Ortega Cultural Center.
Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Features Editor
Content warning: this article contains discussion of anti-Indigenous violence.
From screening films to hosting Indigenous speakers from local tribes, the Zowie Banteah Cultural Center is prepared to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Month this November. Mount Holyoke College, which is located on the ancestral land of the Nonotuck people, is working to promote and honor these events. The Zowie Banteah Cultural Center supports Native and Indigenous students on campus throughout the year.
“The [Zowie Banteah Cultural] Center is really a cultural space … [and] there’s also a real intentionality around having hours for students to collect and gather and spend time with each other,” Kijua Sanders-McMurtry, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, said.
The Zowie Banteah Cultural Center opened in 1995 under the name Native Spirit. In 1997, it was renamed after Zowie Banteah ’96, who helped found the center. It is located in the same building as the Eliana Ortega Cultural Center for Latine students, at 4 Dunlap Place, near the Kendall Sports and Dance Complex. The center is moving locations next semester. However, the new location has not yet been decided.
Mount Holyoke College occupies land that neighboring Indigenous tribes are still connected to. The College’s written land acknowledgment recognizes “the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West and the Abenaki to the North.”
Sanders-McMurtry emphasized that it is important for people to recognize that there are still Native people living in the area. “We got push back … when we put out the land acknowledgment policy … [that] some of our language made it seem like Native American people were removed, and they no longer exist,” Sanders-McMurtry explained. “Somebody wrote back and said, ‘Do not perpetuate this.’”
The Massachusetts government stole Native people’s land by passing the Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act of 1869. In June 1869, the Massachusetts legislature declared “citizens of the Commonwealth … entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities, and subject to all the duties and liabilities” of citizenship. This meant that, while Native people were granted citizenship, their land was made available for purchase by non-Native people.
In the article, “The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849-1869,” authors Ann Marie Plane and Gregory Button note the irony of this act. When Native Americans were granted citizenship in Massachusetts, they were also forced to give up a part of their identity.
According to an article called “Sanctioned Theft: Tribal Land Loss in Massachusetts” from the Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, during the late 18th century, white English settlers served as guardians of native land, supposedly in an attempt to protect and help Indigenous people navigate land negotiations. However, the guardian system didn’t allow Native tribes to manage their own affairs and led to more abuse and corruption at the hands of white colonizers.
In 1833, the Mashpee people, presently known as the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, led a nonviolent uprising against the guardian system, according to an article written by Donald Nielsen in 1985 titled “The Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833.” In 1834, the Legislative Joint Special Committee on the Mashpee Indians granted the Mashpee people the right to govern themselves without white guardians. This was a relatively rare success for Native people in the mid-1800s; other Indigenous peoples in Massachusetts still had guardians, according to Nielsen’s article.
Throughout its history, the College has made severe missteps regarding their treatment of Indigenous communities. The College only recently repatriated the remains of an Indigenous person which had been in their possession until this fall.
“The College, at one point, had the remains of an Indigenous person that were really inappropriately given to the College back in 1918. Those remains were then really problematically treated all throughout the time they were at Mount Holyoke,” Sanders-McMurtry said.
According to the National Park Service, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, passed in 1990, mandated that all institutions that receive federal funding, including colleges, universities, museums, state agencies and local governments, must return the remains of Indigenous people and any cultural artifacts to those who claim them. Federal institutions consult with linear descendants, local tribes or other Indigenous organizations to return human remains or cultural artifacts to the appropriate place.
“There was a lot of misuse of Indigenous peoples’ remains and formerly enslaved African peoples’ remains,” Sanders-McMurtry said. “The goal of the NAGPRA legislation is to have tribes be able to reclaim the ancestral remains of their people that are at universities and colleges.”
After holding the Indigenous person’s remains for over a century, Mount Holyoke, through a six year process, returned the remains to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. According to Sanders-McMurtry, the remains were repatriated to the Stockbridge-Munsee with assistance from the Nipmuc Nation in October 2021.
On Tuesday, Nov. 30, at 6:30 p.m., Larry Spotted Crow Mann, an activist, storyteller, musician and member of the Nipmuc Nation, will give the College’s Indigenous Heritage Month keynote talk entitled, “We Are Still Here, We Are the Story and We Are the Land: Honoring the Past, Present and Future of the Indigenous People of Western Massachusetts.”
Before the talk, which will take place in Gamble Auditorium, there will be a private memorial for Native students to honor the Indigenous ancestor whose remains were recently returned to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. “Then we’ll have more of a public acknowledgment and atonement for this past harm to Indigenous communities that Mount Holyoke participated in,” Sanders-McMurtry explained.
When it comes to supporting Native students, Sanders-McMurtry, while recognizing that she herself is not Native American, emphasized the importance of “not treat[ing] anyone like a poster child.”
“I think the first thing that students who are non-Native should do [is] say, ‘What don’t I know [that] I wish I knew?’ and then seek out resources,” Sanders-McMurtry remarked.
Sanders-McMurtry has a list of things they want to do in the future to support Native students on campus, from hiring more Native faculty to bias education.
“We’re really focused on hearing from the students what they believe is important, so we invite any students who want to come forth about any of the identity pieces that need to be supported,” Sanders-McMurtry said. “In particular, we’re really trying to open the door for Native students to feel like they can come forward and tell us [about] the experiences they’re having.”