Programs to support current and future Native American students, along with both undergraduate and graduate research in the Indigenous humanities, will benefit from a $1.8 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The nearly year-old UW Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies on Sept. 16 received the award, which will fund four years of work at the UW around Native student support, academics, research and cultural programs.

“We spent the first year planning the center from the ground up, meeting with Native faculty, students, staff and community research partners across the UW campuses,” said co-director  a UW associate professor of American Indian Studies. “Through one-on-one meetings, a survey, and writing retreats, we envisioned creating strong communities where we can support and learn from each other. This Mellon grant will go a long way in helping us re-engineer the university to meet these needs.”

The New York-based Mellon Foundation, which supports the humanities in higher education and the arts, awarded the grant in recognition of UW’s potential to be a leader among state flagship universities in the growing field of Indigenous Studies.

The UW launched in fall 2018 to bring together the faculty and students involved in American Indian and Indigenous studies, an interdisciplinary field of research that intersects the social sciences, arts and humanities, education and natural sciences. Nearly a dozen units, including the Provost’s Office, the Graduate School, UW Libraries, UW Tacoma and UW Bothell, contributed to the initial funding of the Center and related activities, a total of over $1 million spread over five years. The Center has a Deans’ advisory board as well as an overall advisory board of Native undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff and community research partners.

American Indian, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students make up an estimated 1% of undergraduates at the UW, and 0.4% of the total faculty. That underrepresentation could begin to change, Vice President for the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity Rickey Hall said, with a campus environment that boosts staffing and activities focused on the Native community.

With the new grant, the center can continue an existing seminar for graduate students — the Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities — and create five new programs for undergraduates, graduates and transfer students:

• The Native UW Scholars Program, a cohort-based program for incoming freshmen that will partner with the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House to host a one-week residential experience in the summer, an orientation program with parents, a year-long seminar and peer mentorships
• The Native Pathways @ UW Program, which will support UW graduate students to teach at two-year and tribal colleges in the area, host a regional Indigenous Studies Higher Education Pedagogy Summit, and support the development of new coursework in AIIS
• experiences, which will provide training and support to undergraduate students undertaking humanities research in American Indian and Indigenous studies through a two-week summer program and peer mentorships to other relevant research experiences across the campuses
• The AIIS Scholars Program, focused on building community among graduate students, faculty and staff through a monthly space to workshop AIIS projects
• The Native Knowledge-in-Residence Program, an initiative to bring Native scholars to the UW to teach classes, offer workshops and supervise research, among other activities

“The Mellon grant will allow us to better leverage the UW’s existing infrastructure for connecting with Native communities; supporting Native students, staff and faculty; and producing innovative scholarship in the expanding field of Indigenous studies,” said center co-director a UW professor of English and associate vice provost for faculty advancement.

The Center can begin implementing the grant immediately, Dennison said. The first priority is to hire the Native Pathways @ UW coordinator to run the new programs.

“Central to our goal of fostering Indigenous communities at the UW is creating a space in which Native knowledge, especially the languages, can thrive,” Dennison said.

The Native Knowledge-in-Residence program will bring Native specialists to the UW’s campuses to teach a sequence of courses in the Department of American Indian Studies, host regular knowledge tables, supervise research projects, offer lectures and workshops, develop curricula, and build partnerships with Indian education programs to create pathways for Native students to and through the university. The first resident of that program will be , a lecturer in American Indian Studies and an expert on the Southern Lushootseed language, the traditional language of the lands that support the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

It’s an important time for American Indian and Indigenous studies in general, said , associate professor and chair of American Indian Studies. “As Canada undergoes an examination of its own history of violence and trauma involving Indigenous peoples, educational institutions there are investing heavily in Indigenous studies. U.S. institutions should do the same.”

While the increased activity and investment around AIIS may be new, the presence of American Indian Studies at UW is not.  Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the Department of American Indian Studies, which started as a small program in 1970. Additional momentum around American Indian and Indigenous studies on the UW campus has come from the creation of the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House, the Bill Holm Center, First Nations @ UW, the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, the iNative Research group, .

“The UW and our partners are now at a point where we can do more than simply reach out to communities that have been marginalized and underserved — we can actually begin to transform academic space across disciplines, working to create supportive ecosystems in which Indigenous peoples and our relations can thrive,” Allen said.

Other UW faculty involved in writing the grant were , associate professor of anthropology, and , associate professor in the Jackson School of International Studies.

For more information on the Mellon grant or CAIIS, contact caiis@uw.edu.

On the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý campus, the study of American Indian and Indigenous issues isn’t confined to a single department. Or, for that matter, to any one UW building, research institute or museum that explicitly focuses on various aspects of Native communities.

While each of these campus units is thriving on its own, what’s missing is a link to bring together the diverse faculty and students involved in American Indian and Indigenous studies, an interdisciplinary field of research that intersects the social sciences, arts and humanities, education and natural sciences.

Now, as the discipline of American Indian Studies approaches its 50^th year at the UW, a new research center is in the works: the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, which is supported by multiple colleges and schools. Led by , associate professor of both American Indian Studies and anthropology, and , professor of English and associate vice provost for faculty advancement, the center aims to support research in American Indian and Indigenous Studies across the three UW campuses, as well as with surrounding Native communities.

In its first year the center will solicit input from interested individuals not only on the three UW campuses, but also from surrounding Native communities. In committing to support American Indian and Indigenous faculty, students, staff and communities, Dennison said, the center must first determine what kinds of support are most needed.

“My goal with the center is to facilitate conversations around what it means to do American Indian and Indigenous studies well,” she said. “We have amazing programming and resources, but we’re not all connected. We’re doing this work in silos. We’re hoping that the center can build bridges across silos, connect folks doing this work, and foster relationships across campuses and with local Native communities and nations.”

Approved in late spring under former Provost Jerry Baldasty, the center was officially organized in September through a governance committee of four deans from the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, the College of the Environment and the Information School. The Department of American Indian Studies will serve as the center’s academic home, and an advisory board recently formed to start planning programs and outreach activities.

Nearly a dozen units, including the Provost’s Office, the Graduate School, UW Tacoma and UW Bothell, have contributed to fund the center and related activities, a total of more than $1 million over five years.

Discussion of a research center had been circulating for years, but it intensified this past year as a potential means of retaining faculty, particularly in the Department of American Indian Studies, professor and chair said. When it comes to the discipline, few other universities have the academic infrastructure the UW has, he added, but several have been promoting additional resources and recruiting faculty.

Through the new center, Teuton said, the UW can build on its strengths, from its geographic location to ongoing scholarship and community outreach, like that driven by the College of the Environment, the College of Education and the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute in the School of Social Work. By bringing people from different units together, offering more research opportunities to graduate students and collaborating with Native communities, he said, the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies is better positioned to elevate scholarship and create impact. The issues that often come up among Native communities — language revitalization, food sovereignty, environmental stewardship, governance and Indigenous education — are also areas of interest among current faculty and students.

Researchers around campus have asked about working with Native communities, but they’re often not sure how to approach the work as a partnership, Teuton said, and the center could facilitate that.

While leaders say the precise name of the center may change — to something in the native Coast Salish language of Southern Lushootseed, for example — the idea of building stronger partnerships with both American Indian and Indigenous peoples is central.

The term “American Indian” is itself a construct, Allen pointed out. How do you recognize First Nations peoples in Canada, who are separated from Native communities in the United States by only a line of latitude? What about other Indigenous peoples across the hemisphere and around the world, many of whom share similar histories of colonialism?

“Indigenous studies always starts with the local. Whose land are we on? What’s the history of this place?” Allen said. “The local is always the foundation, but set within the reality of the global. We don’t pretend that our communities here somehow exist within a bubble. So we need to ask, what kind of name will make people feel the center is doing the kind of responsible work we want to be doing?”

The timing is right to raise the profile of the discipline at the UW, he said. A new graduate certificate in American Indian and Indigenous Studies is being developed for next year. Several support and advisory groups are in place, serving all levels of the university, and there is potential to expand on new partnerships between the Department of American Indian Studies and community colleges around the state, which enroll approximately 4,500 Native students.

As the center continues to develop, leaders say collaboration is the key, with various ways for the campus community to be involved. The structure of the leadership was intentional — Allen will serve as co-director for one year, Dennison for three — and members of the advisory board will have staggered terms to allow others to join. The leadership expects to reach out to the broader campus about the center’s mission and programs later this year.

“It’s a very Indigenous way of doing things,” Teuton said. “Everyone shares what they have to contribute, and together it creates something wonderful. Something bigger comes out of our collective effort.”

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For more information, contact the center at caiis@uw.edu.