This blogpost was originally published on 10/11/20. This post was a collaborative effort between all members of the Women’s Center staff team. A majority of this post was written by student staff members.

Today is Indigenous People’s Day. Some may continue to claim this as “Columbus Day” but to celebrate Columbus is to celebrate colonialism, mass genocide, racism, and the (both historic and modern) oppression of Native Americans and all of the indigenous people.

To honor Indigenous People’s Day and the community it centers, the Women’s Center is sharing how we try to honor and acknowledge the Indigenous roots of our area, the land that UMBC occupies, as well as the long history of universities benefitting from the violent seizure of Native lands. 

In doing so, we would like to start by sharing the land recognition statement that we use (with thank yous to the Office of Equity and Inclusion, Dresher Center, and Dr. Ashley Minner from American Studies for sharing the newly official* land recognition statement with us, as well):

UMBC was established upon the land of the Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples. Susquehannocks ceded this land and, over time, citizens of many more Indigenous nations have come to reside in this region. 

For those residing in the area: this is not our land; we occupy it. Colonialism has long undergirded systemic violence faced by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.

We humbly offer our respects to all past, present, and future indigenous people connected to this place.

*as this blog was being written, UMBC released an official land recognition statement that is linked here

Full disclosure: as the Women’s Center has learned more about Indigenous peoples, our land recognition statement evolves. We also recognize that a simple statement is not enough. Land recognition can simply be a performative step of solidarity, so that is why we seek to learn and build on this work. And also why we hope you’ll read on.

What is land recognition and why is it important?

A land recognition is a formal statement that recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as the traditional stewards of a region. It recognizes the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous people and their traditional territories. 

Recognizing the land where we reside is an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory you reside on. It’s a process of honoring the Indigenous people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial (in spite of the notion that Indigenous people are a purely historical population/that Native Americans “don’t exist”). Land recognition is also a way of respecting Indigenous people’s inherent kinship beliefs when it comes to the land as these beliefs were restricted and stigmatized for so long.

Ultimately, land recognition is a process of:

• addressing invisibility
• honoring Indigenous peoples
• raising critical consciousness
• building affinity to create alliances                    

How have universities benefitted from the expulsion and exploitation of Indigenous peoples?

In order to explain how specifically universities have benefitted from colonialism, we look to the 19th century and the oft lionized President Abraham Lincoln. In 1862, Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which freely distributed “public domain lands” (scare quotes explained below) to universities as seed capital for the creation of “land-grant universities” or LGUs (more appropriately called, “land-GRAB universities”). These lands then raised funds for fledgling colleges, or LGUs, across the nation. The land gifted through the Morrill Act was land seized or ceded by Native Americans to the US government. Although many treaties were created in order to legally and officially exchange land ownership, almost all of these treaties were products of coercion and exploitation of the continued systemic degradation of Indigenous people.

Once the government gifted these land parcels to institutions of higher education, the lands were then either sold to speculators to generate university endowments or universities became speculators themselves on the lands given to them. 

All told, the land-grabs, when adjusted for inflation, were worth about half a billion dollars. 

Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News (2020)

In other words, it’s not enough to recognize the land that universities are built on; we must also recognize the land from which universities build a significant profit. In fact, the grants were as big or bigger than major cities, and were often located hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their beneficiaries (this is exemplified by our very own University of Maryland; more below). 

Campuses in the US are inherently built on stolen land, but they are also built by stolen land. 

To see how your college or university directly benefits from land grabs, you can see Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s interactive map of the United States and the way the Morrill Act parceled away Indigenous lands.

A university to highlight (in the case of the University System of Maryland) would be the University of Maryland, which, as you can see via Lee and Ahtone’s data, benefitted from 1,456 Indigenous land parcels across the US totaling 202,971 acres.

It can be difficult to imagine how big that much land is, so in terms universities might particularly appreciate that’s:

• 156,132 football fields
• 37,587 Capital One Fields (with a combined capacity of 37,587,222 people social distancing at 5 square feet)
• 152 UMD College Park campuses 
• 406 UMBC campuses
• 3.5 Baltimores

Tribal nations who originated on this violently ceded land include the Chippewa, Ottawa, Kansas, Great and Little Osage, Oto, Missouri, Sioux (Wahpeton and Sisseton Band), Sioux (Medewakanton and Wahpekuta), Chippewa of the Mississippi and Lake Superior, and the Omaha.

Are land recognitions enough?

No.

As we said at the top, land recognition, if not backed by research and a commitment to learning, is performative activism at best. So… what can we do?

Well, we can’t fix the history of land-grab universities. Unless we not only give back stolen land (land which is now used for grocery stores, gas stations, warehouses, entire neighborhoods, baseball stadiums, and cemeteries among other things), but commit to reparations, we can’t fix anything. As Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy is quoted: “The more work that we do with decolonization and reconciliation, the more you start to realize there is no reconciliation without the return of stolen land.”

The more work that we do with decolonization and reconciliation, the more you start to realize there is no reconciliation without the return of stolen land.

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy

The first step to doing better, is by acknowledging and understanding this history. This is a teeny tiny step, but it’s a step. The information above is by no means complete and it is also mostly from the two-year reporting of Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone of High Country News. You should read the full article here.

Beyond reading and learning (many more resources below), the Women’s Center student staff has also generated some good ideas that we’re ready and willing to share.

Suggestions for going beyond land recognitions

For UMBC in particular:

• Conduct outreach toward the Piscataway Conoy tribe through their Tribal Council and discuss how to make a more readily available path to higher education for those who we owe our campus to 
• More research on UMBC’s Indigenous student populations, especially in differentiating American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN), Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI), and other Indigenous students
• Address the alienation Indigenous students may feel rather than simply asking them to participate in “diversity” initiatives. 
• Implement a Land Recognition policy for all school-funded events
• Include a Land Recognition on all UMBC affiliated websites (we are one step closer as of today with an official UMBC land recognition statement)
• Whenever possible, discuss how programming, curriculum may relate to Indigenous people and their history and interests
• Structure classes to allow students to explore non-normative pedagogies such as those informed by Indigenous cultures and scholars
• Redirect profits made from Indigenous land to supporting the education of indigenous students
• Going beyond awareness of the injustice and actually doing work to challenge the injustice. This means working with the Piscataway Conoy Tribal Council to understand their specific wishes on this. 
• Work with offices like Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion, and Belonging (I3B) and/or the Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI) to create intentional space for Indigenous identifying students on UMBC’s campus
• Support, amplify, and create platforms for Indigenous voices
• Create large-scale events, campaigns celebrating Indigenous People’s Day
• Highlight and encourage research that identifies the inequities Indigenous students face 

Generally speaking

• Research! Get your stories from Indian Country Today, High Country News, Native Lens, or other Indigenous media platforms
• Learn about Indigenous studies through more than just a historical lens
• Whenever possible, discuss how programming, curriculum may relate to Indigenous people and their history and interests
• Structure classes to allow students to explore non-canonical pedagogies such as those informed by Indigenous cultures and scholars
• Redirect profits made from Indigenous land to supporting the education of indigenous students
• Ask Indigenous students what they need to be best supported 
• Create more programming that specifically centers Indigineity 
• Support Indigenous organizations by donating your time and/or money
  • Baltimore American Indian Center       
  • Native American LifeLines, Inc.  
  • Piscataway Conoy Tribe      
  • National Museum of the American Indian 
• Support Indigenous-led grassroots change movements and campaigns
  • Start here: Support local government initiatives to officially change “Columbus Day” to “Indigenous People’s Day” OR call your local representative and ask them why your state is still celebrating Columbus Day. Not sure? Here’s a list from 2019 of states that have made a change.
• Commit to returning land (local, state, federal governments around the world are currently returning land to Indigenous people)
• Support, amplify, and create platforms for Indigenous voices
• Create large-scale events, campaigns celebrating events like Indigenous People’s Day and National Native American Heritage Month (coming in November!!)

Resources:

• LandGrabU.org
• UMBC statement on land recognition
• Indigenous Land Acknowledgement Information
• “Land-grab universities” by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, High Country News
• Cornell University and Indigenous Dispossession Project
• Beyond the Land Acknowledgement: College “LAND BACK” or Free Tuition for Native Students, Hack the Gates
• Why Land Acknowledgments Matter by Chip Colwell
• Why capitalize “Indigenous”? by Christine Weeber
• Northwestern University Land Acknowledgement
• Native Lens
• Native Appropriations
• All My Relations Podcast by Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene
• Surviving Disappearance, Re-Imagining & Humanizing Native Peoples: Matika Wilbur at TEDxSeattle
• The Anti-Indigenous Handbook By Tristan Ahtone, Lorena Allam, Leilani Rania Ganser, Kalen Goodluck, Brittany Guyot, and Anna V. Smith

For more information on disability services at UMBC, including how to get accommodations and reporting issues of inaccessibility, please see our previous post outlining these resources.

This October, as we begin to recognize National Disability Awareness Month, we here in the Women’s Center are excited to relaunch Critical Social Justice with the theme of Disability Justice + Access Matters!

Our goal is for our conversations to build a vision of a world where all bodies are valued and essential, and where we acknowledge and affirm that other identities intersect, creating a unique lived experience.  A society built on global capitalism, colonialism, and the multiple oppression of disabled people asserts everyday that people’s bodies are “expendable.”  However, we work to challenge that idea and honor that everyone has inherent worth independent of their productivity or labor.  As we attempt to “return to normal,” we have to reconsider who “normal” serves and take into account the lessons learned from how we have lived and survived through the pandemic.  What can we do, and what should we do, to carry forward the practices of accessibility?  

To kick off a year of Critical Social Justice events, we began with CSJ 101: Disability Justice at UMBC + Beyond.  Leading this workshop was the Women’s Center’s own, Amelia Meman, who described for participants the current state of the disability rights movement and what disability justice means as a more radical concept.

Participants started by discussing a few definitions of disability justice and the ways it resonated with each individual.  A few examples were intersectionality and the myth of a “neutral body”.  The conversation then moved into highlighting some important founders of the disability justice movement, which included:

• Patty Berne: co-founder and artistic director of Sins Invalid, a radical crip artist and activist group prioritizing queer people of color with disabilities
• Mia Mingus: writer, educator, and trainer for transformative justice and disability justice
• Stacey Park Milbern: a Bay Area-based organizer and disability justice thought leader
• Leroy Moore Jr.: a Black artist, writer, poet, activist, feminist, founder of Krip Hop, and co-founder of Sins Invalid

These four figures (and several other queer and disabled activists) developed the idea of disability justice which prioritized the needs of disabled people located at the intersection of multiple identities, and thus, experience layered oppression. With this established, the discussion then illustrated a vision for disability justice (originally developed by Sins Invalid), where we recognize that: 

• All bodies are considered unique and essential.
• All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.
• Each and every person is powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.
• All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them.

With the main founders and principles laid out, the group thought about how we do disability justice, starting with revisiting how we think about disability.  The medical model of disability “others” people’s bodies by viewing them as something to be rehabilitated, fixed, or cured.  Meanwhile, the social model was established to assert that disability is something born from people with impairments interacting with a society that doesn’t account for accessibility or justice in communication, interpersonal relationships, the political world, or in physical infrastructure.  It is the social model which has provided the foundation for the disability justice movement, the idea that disability isn’t related to personal deficit, but that it is the result of an inaccessible society that “disables”.  

Next, Amelia led the group through a few ways that allies and others with positional power can do the work to practice and leverage disability justice.  This included accepting feedback and changing as necessary, learning about disability justice, considering how to use positional power to create intentional accessibility, making content and spaces accessible, and finally listening and centering disabled people’s experiences.

To wrap up CSJ 101, the group discussed their experiences with disability and access at UMBC and off-campus. Some of the experiences named by those in attendance were*:

• “I often experience the physical campus as inaccessible.”
• “Accessibility routes can be confusing and accommodations are limited for some.”
• “Ableist implicit biases inform us all. We are all unlearning ableism.”
• “I have had frustrating experiences of inconsistent communication and support.”
• “I feel like there is a general lack of understanding, compassion, and humility on the part of UMBC faculty, staff, and other students when it comes to disability access and equity, and in working with disabled students.”
• “The pandemic has made UMBC consider and vastly improve digital and remote accessibility. The hope is that these practices should not end with the effort to “return to normal,” especially since many disabled community members have required and asked for these services for a long time.”
• “We should question the nature of medicalization, and what is considered the “normal” expectation of how a person’s body should look and function in and out of the classroom.”

Just as CSJ 101 participants were left with these questions, we also urge readers and our community members to consider: “What does disability justice mean to you?” and “How will you incorporate disability justice into your life?”  Even if it is through small practices such as changing vocabulary or practicing online accessibility, consider what you can do personally and in coordination with any positions of privilege to be in solidarity with the disabled community on and off-campus.  

If you are interested, you can access a recording of the CSJ 101: Disability Justice at UMBC + Beyond.  We also invite you to join us in our learning by attending our upcoming Critical Social Justice: Disability Justice and Access Matters events.  Check out our myUMBC page and follow along by subscribing to this blog!

*Considering this was an event with a small subset of UMBC community members, these themes and personal experiences should be viewed as individual opinions. In other words, many others experiencing impairments may not share the same opinion that this campus feels inaccessible.

For those who are experiencing some level of inaccessibility or ableism, it is important to know that there are resources and offices at our UMBC with the express purpose of assisting to resolve these issues. For more information on student accommodations, please check out the Office of Student Disability Services. For more on UMBC faculty, staff, and visitor accommodations/access needs OR to make a report of an inaccessibility, please check out the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services. If you believe you are being treated unfairly because of your disability and/or impairments (or any other aspect of your social identities), please consider working with the Office of Equity and Inclusion to make a report (anonymous reporting options are also available).

Stan Jackson, Director of the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP), in the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) will be retiring from UMBC after 32 years of USM service, including nearly 12 at UMBC. Please join us in wishing Stan well as he transitions into retirement life:

• WebEx Celebration on Thursday, October 21, 2021, from 10-11 a.m. Please block the time on your calendar and join us using this link. Please sign this e-card before October 21.
• An in-person buffet luncheon on Thursday, October 21, 2021, from 1-4 p.m. in Catonsville. Please reach out to Dean Drake at ddrake@umbc.edu if you are interested in attending. We will have something at the event for you to sign. 

When Stan first joined USM, he started as an Accounting Associate with the Maryland 4-H Foundation, then worked as an accounting associate for UMCP’s contract and grant accounting office, before moving to the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI). He then became a Contract and Grant Administrator for the central research office and Business Manager for the Center of Marine Biotechnology at UMBI. Continuing his support at the departmental level, he moved to UMCP’s Department of Psychology before coming to UMBC’s OSP as a Grants and Contracts Manager in 2009. In 2015, Stan was promoted to Assistant Director of OSP, and then to Director of OSP in 2017. While serving as the OSP Director Stan was integral in the implementation of Kuali, a key platform necessary to support the continued growth of UMBC’s research and creative achievement activities. Stan also developed and implemented a telework plan for OSP-- the first in OVPR--and worked with the AVP on a long-term reorganization of OSP position descriptions that improved efficiencies, created transparent career paths, and decreased staff turn-over.

Stan is a Certified Research Administrator (CRA). He has presented at numerous National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) national and regional meetings over the years and has served on the Regional NCURA Program Committee. He was also a NCURA Mentor in its “Mentor Me” program. Last, but certainly not least, Stan successfully proposed and was awarded a NCURA Global Fellowship Travel Award in 2019, which improved UMBC research administrative collaborations with our Japanese partners at Kyushu University. 

In his personal life, Stan  is an active member of the Lutheran Church of St. Andrew, serving as Chair of the Board of Director and Chair of Global Missions, as well as participating in international service to collaborating schools in Namibia and Guatemala. He has also provided mentorship and religious education to the people in his congregation and has used his cooking and BBQ expertise in preparing and making food for select church events. Stan is married with one daughter and one granddaughter, whose pictures he is quick to share. He loves to cook and was once part of a competitive BBQ team, even creating his own “Bubba” BBQ sauce. His smoked salmon and Canadian bacon were always the most sought after gift at the annual OSP holiday gift exchange. 

Stan has always brought laughter, fun and, of course, food to his endeavors at UMBC. While we will all miss Stan, please join us in wishing him nothing but happiness as he embarks on his next journey.

Stan’s last day on campus is Friday, October 29, 2021.

Please see the latest updates on UMBC’s Retriever Ready website. Questions? Email covid19@umbc.edu.

Enjoying Homecoming Safely

• We hope you will attend Homecoming 2021 this weekend. Please practice safe on-campus behavior, including wearing a mask outdoors if you are not able to physically distance. 

Feeling Sick? 

• If you have cold or flu symptoms, getting tested for COVID-19 is not enough. Reach out to your healthcare provider to seek treatment (they will also arrange for testing). Students may also make an appointment with Retriever Integrated Health. Please do not come to campus to test as you may expose others to COVID-19 or other illnesses. 

COVID-19 Related Absences

• If you are feeling unwell, please do not come to campus or attend class. However, students should keep in mind that they will still need to make up missed work. Please let your professor know ASAP if you cannot attend class. More information is here.

COVID-19 Health and Safety

• Traveling domestically? Check out this guidance from the CDC.

Dear Faculty and Staff,

We are pleased to announce this year’s Open Enrollment for State of Maryland benefits will be online in SPS Workday from Monday, October 18 through 5 p.m. on Friday, November 12, 2021. During this time, employees can enroll, cancel, or make changes to their health benefits, with updates becoming effective January 1, 2022. Employees will receive alerts regarding Open Enrollment from the State of Maryland via the SPS Workday system (stateofmaryland@myworkday.com).

This year, we will share virtual Open Enrollment resources on the HR Website as they become available from the State of Maryland. Resources will include Open Enrollment videos, virtual information session dates, state wellness information, and links to the 2022 benefits guide and rates.

Prior to the start of Open Enrollment, it is important that employees gain access to SPS Workday using the OneLogin Process.Instructions can be found here.

Finally, to ensure timely receipt of vendor communications, including membership cards, we encourage employees to login to their myUMBC Profile (under About, and select View More) to ensure your home address is current. Address changes can be made in the Payroll Online Service Center (POSC).

If you have questions, please contact the Human Resources Benefits Team at hrbenefits@umbc.edu Thank you!

Human Resources Benefits Team