Photo by Ali Meizels ‘23
By Jesse Hausknecht-Brown ’25
Features Editor & Layout Editor
Warm sunlight flows into the large glass windows at the new Zowie Banteah Cultural Center, which looks out on the Upper Lake. Colloquially known as the Zowie, the center’s new space is located between Ham and MacGregor Halls. The Zowie is a space that “promotes visibility and empowerment for Native American[s] and communities of Indigenous people” on campus, as stated on the Mount Holyoke website.
Construction on the new space has been going on throughout the semester and the center will officially open up for use in fall 2022. While the current location will continue to be in use for the remainder of this semester, the Zowie held a ribbon cutting ceremony at the new space during BOOM! on Tuesday, March 29.
Photo by Ali Meizels ‘23
“That was really nice. It was nice to see new faces, old faces and to share the opening with everybody. That’s really important when you open something up,” Juliette Gagnon Strong Heart ’24, the program assistant and building manager for the Zowie, said. “We had artwork there that was my artwork. We have really good food, that was really awesome to have Indigenous made and inspired and sourced food at an event.”
Strong Heart expressed thanks to Latrina Denson, the associate dean of students for community and inclusion and advisor for the Zowie, Rachel Beth Sayet, a Native American and Indigenous Studies community development fellow at Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College, and Marcella Runell Hall, the vice president for student life and dean of students.
“[Sayet] did a blessing for everybody who came into the space … and [Hall] said some really wonderful things that I will never forget,” Strong Heart recalled. “I really appreciated that. Afterwards we had a listening circle with Sabra Thorner from the anthropology department who’s my mentor in class. … It was really wonderful. Definitely a lot of smiling, I don’t think I stopped smiling.”
The primary reason for the move is to make the Zowie more accessible. Currently, it is located at 4 Dunlap Place on the second floor and cannot be accessed without going up a flight of stairs. The first floor is the Eliana Ortega Cultural Center for students within the Latinx diaspora.
“If the Ortega is having an event, you don’t want to go in the front door and walk into someone’s meeting, obviously,” Strong Heart said. “So you’ll go in the back, which is actually where the entrance for the Zowie is and you’ll go down the hallway and then up these stairs that are just really narrow. Any way to access Zowie currently — you need to go up stairs. It’s limiting.”
Strong Heart believes it is important that the Ortega, which is a large organization with many members, has its own space, stating that “everyone deserves their own space in my opinion.”
The new space offers more privacy to Indigenous students to practice elements of their culture and identity. Part of the construction involves adding walls that Strong Heart hopes will provide a sense of protection.
“The value overall, I think [is] its potential,” Strong Heart said. “Having that space with computers, being able to give presentations and speeches in there, hav[ing] people from other schools come here, holding educational workshops, holding meeting workshops … and then also other cultural centers being able to use it, its potential is huge.”