director, strategic partnerships and co-curricular learning staff and graduate student Cornell University Ithaca, New York, United States
Abstract: In this lightning talk I will share reflections from the first year of our Sga:t ędwatahí:ne - (Ska•d en• dwa • ta• he• nit) Fellows program, designed to build stronger bridges between Cornell University and Haudenosaunee communities across New York state. In summer 2022 the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement at Cornell launched this project with our first cohort of three Fellows, from Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' (Cayuga), Onondaga, and Mohawk nations. The program comes at a time when Cornell is reckoning with how it has long benefited from Indigenous land dispossession.
Guiding these relationships and this project is the Two Row Wampum or Gaswéñdah. Since 1613 this agreement has guided Haudenosaunee-settler interactions. In the talk we will share more about this historic and enduring agreement, and how the Sga:t ędwatahí:ne Fellows programs centers this in our relationship building, process and events with students and faculty. This includes the naming of the Fellowship itself, which was done with and by our Fellows, arriving at Sga:t ędwatahí:ne, or “as one we are all walking the path together”.
Join us to learn how we are walking the long road toward repair, while creating opportunities for students to serve Indigenous peoples on their Territories.
Narrative: Cornell has long benefited from Indigenous land dispossession. While our American Indian Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) has built relationships with Haudenosaunee leaders, students, staff, and faculty who lead community-engaged learning and research projects largely fail to serve our local Indigenous neighbors. As an anchor institution in the region, Cornell cannot abandon its ethical duty to support communities being repeatedly damaged by systemic inequity.
The purpose of this talk is to share the guiding framework, structure, and reflections from the first year of our program. This includes the intense relationship building we needed to overcome years (centuries) of distrustful dealings with institutions including the university. In the past year we have made visible not only the strong leadership within these nations, but also the dynamics that have led to the invisibilizing of the on-going trauma inflicted on local Indigenous peoples.
The theoretical foundation for the talk is the Two Row agreement. This is a shared Indigenous-settler analytic, that offers the potential for solidarity. The Onondaga Nation explains, “The Haudenosaunee see the Two Row Wampum as a living treaty.” That nation’s Indigenous Values Initiative (https://indigenousvalues.org/decolonization/guswentha-two-row-wampum-belt/) notes how “The Two Row Wampum belt is a metaphor for how the European newcomers and the Haudenosaunee mutually agreed to live in peace as brothers while pursuing parallel but separate paths of culture, belief, and law.”
We have practiced living into this agreement with an emergent program design. While we proposed “Haudenosaunee Fellows” as a name in our initial conversations with Sachem Sam George (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ'), Sachem Spencer Lyons (Onondaga), and Jonel Beauvais (Mohawk), this named served only as a starting point from which we soon adapted. Likewise, we have adapted our original model at nearly every stage including balancing short-term and long-term desires of our Indigenous Fellows, how much we in the Einhorn Center sought to schedule for them for each of their four visits to campus, and the Fellowship timeline of when we anticipated projects would emerge in which students could participate.
On that final note we learned that it will take a full year of “walking the path together” to build enough trust to even conceive of potential projects in which the Fellows might desire student participation. (Each fellows received a $5,000 honorarium, and going forward can apply for a $3,000 grant for projects that include Cornell undergraduates.) In striving to make this program live into the Two Row principles of Friendship, Good Minds and Peace – which are represented in the Covenant Chain of Friendship in the Two Row – partnerships and projects have emerged on their own time as we have slowly strengthened relationships. For example, it was not until the final months of the Fellowship that graduate students connected with the Fellows to create a summer theater camp for Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' youth. We know now that we will continue to play connector roles for “past” Fellows from which projects will emanate.
I believe this talk is significant because of the shadow legacy of the land grant legislation, as well as because many rural universities lie in close proximity to Indigenous Lands and nations. This has been a collaboration across siloes within the institution; through this program we have built stronger relationships with AIISP and our West Campus housing system, which hosted the Fellows and put them into contact with students. Generative moments abounded, from the Fellows peaking with Indigenous students to make the campus more welcoming, to an event on International Women’s Day that sparked many relationships (and the theater project noted above), to reflective moments among the Einhorn Center staff that helped us see how lessons learned with the Fellows could be applied to all of our partnership work, from naming projects to timelines, to trusting that mutually beneficial projects will emerge.
These generative moments usually were accompanied by tensions: in moving too quickly (or slowly) with a name – to the chagrin of our communications team – to over-scheduling the Fellows and not accounting for the emotional impact the Fellows would have on people with whom they spoke, to challenges by university leadership to the long-term desires of the Fellows (land back). In my lightning talk I will touch on this final tension, noting advocacy efforts and how these were challenged by university leadership, especially given that this is a staff-led endeavor, and staff do not have the privilege of tenure to keep their livelihoods secure. Each of the Fellows confidently put forth a nomination for the next cohort, signaling the value they found in their time with us.
