Photo by Emma Quirk ‘26.
Adrienne Keene presents a slide about the “Land Back” movement as she speaks in Gamble Auditorium.
By Emma Quirk ’26
Photos Editor and Staff Writer
Content warning: This article discusses colonial violence.
Mount Holyoke College’s theme for this year’s Native and Indigenous Heritage Month is “Grounded” — “an affirmation of the deep connections between people, with land and with history that Indigenous cultures are based on. It is an affirmation that these things not only exist here, but that they can continue to be built,” according to the Dean’s Corner from Nov. 11.
Dr. Adrienne Keene, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, assistant professor of American studies and ethnic studies at Brown University and founder of Native Appropriations, delivered a keynote lecture on Nov. 6 in Gamble Auditorium.
“Native Appropriations is a forum for discussing representations of Native peoples, including stereotypes, cultural appropriation, news, activism and more,” according to its website.
The event began with a Land Acknowledgment, followed by Five College Native American Community Development Fellow Rachel-Beth Sayet introducing Keene.
Keene began her presentation with a quote from Angela Davis’ “Freedom is a Constant Struggle” that read, “Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”
Keene explained that while the discussion centered on settler colonialism in the United States, it could still be tied to modern-day conflicts such as the ongoing one in the Middle East. “We can pull those parallels to what’s going on in Gaza. We can see those connections, and we can start to draw some lessons and think about the possibility for Palestinian futures as well as Indigenous ones here in the U.S.,” she said.
She went on to share a Cherokee creation story. “I started with this story because I want to start building the connection between us as Indigenous people and the lands that we come from,” Keene said. “For Indigenous people, we all have these stories about how we as humans came to these lands, about how these lands were formed, about our connection to our homelands.”
Between the Trail of Tears and the Dawes Act, Keene shared her own family’s story of displacement during settler colonialism.
In the 1830s, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, also known as the Trail of Tears. This was a “forced and brutal relocation of approximately 100,000 Indigenous people,” according to the Cherokee Historical Association. Congress additionally passed the General Allotment Act, or the Dawes Act, in 1887. This policy allowed the president to separate reservation land into allotments for individual Indigenous people. Only Native people who were registered with a federally recognized nation were granted an allotment, according to the U.S. National Archives.
However, Keene emphasized that “all of these attempts of severing my family … Cherokee people … were attempts to separate us from the land and from community and from the knowledge that comes from the land. But obviously, because I’m standing here today, I identify as a Cherokee person. They weren’t successful.”
During her presentation, Keene shared a map displaying the shift from the United States being entirely possessed by Indigenous peoples to being almost entirely owned by colonizers.
“To see the map of the United States and how it went from green, Indian-owned land to white, settler-owned and what we have now is how it feels to be a Native American,” Madeline Peters, a Native American and the director of accessible education and 504 coordinators at Mount Holyoke, said in an email interview with Mount Holyoke News. “Your family once had something that is no longer yours and the continued struggle is to make a life for your family and your children and their children and so on.”
In regards to settler colonialism, “Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories about how we came to be in a particular place, indeed, how we came to be a place,” Keene said. “There are complications in this, but the root of settler colonialism is the attempts to destroy to replace, so coming to a place … [and] attempting to destroy [what] was there in order to replace it and build a new society.”
A significant portion of Keene’s discussion centered on land acknowledgments. She called in educator Hayden King, who helped draft the land acknowledgment for Ryerson University in 2012 and later said he regretted it. According to Keene, King’s op-ed “encouraged us to add the phrase … and this is what that compels me to do.”
King identified that the problem with these statements is that nothing changes in the institutions themselves to become more inclusive or supportive of Indigenous people. As Keene explained, land acknowledgments need to “mean action … mean actual commitments to the Indigenous peoples whose land you’re on.”
“Every non-Native university and college is a colonial institution built on and from Indigenous land,” Keene said. The Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, originally passed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was meant to “take parcels of Indigenous land and give them to states in order for them to sell them and to make revenue to build flagship, agricultural universities.” The University of Massachusetts Amherst, for example, was a recipient of the Morrill Act.
Some students who attended the keynote lecture were unaware of the Morrill Act and its role in the wealth of institutions.
“I hadn’t realized that the institutional wealth of so many colleges and universities stems from the exploitation and erasure of Indigenous communities in the 19th and 20th centuries through the selling of their land,” Helen Frank ’25 said in an email interview with Mount Holyoke News. “Dr. Keene shared many great resources [to learn more about this],” including Land-Grab Universities.
Keene also shared that UMass Amherst acquired over “$3 million [in today’s money] of revenue from these parcels of Indigenous lands that were sold to help build the university.” Despite all that the university has taken and gained from Indigenous land, as of 2018, there were only 37 Native students enrolled there.
In addition to the expropriation of land to build colleges and universities, the history of Western education in regard to Native people “was cultural genocide … assimilation … remov[al] from families … all of these awful, horrible things,” Keene said. “When you have Native students in university today, they’re bringing with them this history, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that our communities still see value in higher education.”
On a projector screen, Keene showed an image of three Indigenous boys before and after they were forced to attend a reservation school. “The picture of all the children in the boarding school was heartbreaking, to see the children with their hair cut was hard, to know that the children were taken from their families and beaten for speaking their language is always hard,” Peters said.
“There’s no reconciliation work without the return of stolen lands,” Keene explained. “It’s not just the physical return of land into Indigenous stewardship. It’s also about the things that come with that land: the language, the ceremony, the relationships, the medicines, the kinship, all of those, that knowledge that comes with the relationship to land.”
Throughout her presentation, Keene emphasized the importance of proper representation in classrooms, in the media and in higher education institutions. Keene specifically highlighted the significance of admissions in these institutions, asking, “Who are you bringing into campus? Where are the students … and how are you bringing them in together so you don’t have one lone Native student … trying to be everything for everyone.”
Beyond the student population, Keene asserts that there needs to be Indigenous people in staff and faculty positions, both at the entry and senior levels. For both students and staff, “it has to be about clusters of multiple people, not tokens.”
Keene shared how the representation of Native people in media has changed over time and highlighted some recent positive representations on TV and in books. She touched on the importance of media that focuses on modern and current Indigenous peoples, but also looks to the future. “I think it’s important not just for us to make representations that represent who we are today and the complications of our contemporary experience but also to push that into the future and imagine something beyond settler colonialism,” Keene said.
Once the presentation ended, the floor was opened for a Q&A with the audience. After questions, attendees mingled with Keene and each other while being treated to a dessert reception catered by the Willits-Hallowell Conference Center.
Audience members had many takeaways from the event.
“The point that Dr. Keene’s presentation and the following discussion drove home was that [Land Back] and reparations are tangible in more ways than non-Natives may realize,” Frank said. “I was excited to learn about land taxes and the Land Back examples that Dr. Keene uplifted.”
These examples include legislation returning land to its original inhabitants, internal fundraising from Indigenous communities to purchase land and people leaving swaths of land to local Indigenous communities in their wills.
Frank continued, “Dr. Keene and the event organizers made it clear that for non-Natives, building and maintaining relationships with Indigenous communities is vital to ensuring our land acknowledgments are more than empty words and performative actions.”