by Dr. Phill Alexander, Assistant Professor, ETBD and FAM Negotiating Team Chair
Today, October 9th, is a United States federal holiday. To many, it’s Columbus Day, a holiday that celebrates when Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of the United States, mistakenly believing he was in India. That event branded my ancestors as “Indians,” then “American Indians.” While some may find this to be a cause of celebration, it was the beginning of this county’s history but also the opening salvo in a long, difficult transition for the people who lived here.
In recent years, the move has been made to reimagine Columbus Day as “Indigenous People’s Day,” a move that deserves applause and which I hope in my heart will move us in slow paces away from the deification of Columbus. That move, however, represents only the smallest move away from the problematic history of Columbus and the colonization of “the United States.”
I occupy a curious position at Miami University. I am on the one hand a “local” kid. I didn’t grow up in Oxford, but I grew up in Richmond, Indiana, just about a half-hour away and just over the state line. I spent my early years with a deep reverence for Miami University, and I spent my high school years visiting Oxford and admiring the lives of the undergraduates. I couldn’t afford to attend as an undergrad, but as a masters student in writing, I spent two years haunting Bachelor Hall, the former student of a Miami alum at Indiana University who was soon to complete his PhD studies under yet another Miami alum (the very person who was instrumental in Miami no longer being the Redskins).
I am also a Cherokee, one with only one sixteenth European blood, who grew up still in hiding after my ancestors fled relocation from North Carolina to Oklahoma in the legendary Trail of Tears. I am, based on the last statistics I saw, one of the few Indigenous scholars at Miami University, but I am also, ironically, from a tribe that once waged a small scale war with the Miami Tribe. While it will mean little in the history of our respective peoples, I do apologize for my ancestors, but I would also remind any Miami reading that you “started it.” Cherokee are reactive. We prefer not to battle, but we also hold tight to our sense of justice and can be known to carry a grudge.
On this Indigenous People’s Day/ (screw you) Columbus Day, I’d like to speak for just a moment about what it means to be an Indigenous scholar in America. Bear in mind I have colleagues I love and respect in the Myaamia Center. The experience I describe here is not meant to reflect theirs, nor is it meant to embody the same spirit and philosophy. The Myaamia Center should be noted and respected for the work it has done in preserving tribal history and traditions. My work, while it works to preserve the Cherokee way of thinking and acting, is much more about what Chippewa scholar Gerald Vizenor called survivance: we survive and thrive in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
What does survivance mean for a Cherokee scholar on a campus that is in part named after a once-rival tribe in a country (America) named for a cartographer who drew the land that was carved up and “purchased” by colonists who followed Columbus (the namesake of this state’s capital city) to the “new” world which wasn’t new at all. I guess since if you hadn’t seen it, it was new to you. But what does it mean to survive and thrive here?
I am the only BIPOC scholar in my department here at Miami University. I also work in a field that is largely white, largely male. I am also a citizen of this country who is often questioned, as I both pass visually (light eyes, facial hair, not pale but certainly not the deep red-tan of my stereotypical ancestors) and am descendant from Cherokee who hid so well from relocation that I cannot trace myself back to the Dawes Act rolls, so while my Cherokee peers know and recognize that I am Cherokee, I can never “legally” be Cherokee in the eyes of the United States, a fact that barely bothers me as I don’t really strive to be recognized by the same government that ripped my ancestors from their ancestral lands and paraded them to a place we knew nothing of, a “new world” of a different sort. But it positions me in a strange, strange space.
The other issue I face is that while I can share all these bits of history with you, can tell you how much I snarl when I hear someone say “Columbus Day,” how I can share a hearty chuckle with my mixed-blood Indiana Miami tribe mentor over the fact that once my people and her people waged war and now we’re close allies and frequent collaborators, the truth is I grew up in the same world all of you grew up in. I grew up different. I understand and value different things. But as a kid, I played basketball (like all good Indiana kids), and I collected baseball cards. I have an undying love for comic books, board games, video games, and the like. I am 46-years-old and still collect toys. My favorite music isn’t something tribal or traditional; I still reach for my Nirvana, my REM, my rap singles, my post-punk standards.
I am Cherokee. But I’m Cherokee now. I’m not frozen in history. I know traditional crafts, but I don’t wear moccasins. I can’t dance and make it rain, no matter how many times an older white male scholar makes that charming joke. I’m allergic to tobacco, which actually makes some ceremonies difficult. I don’t know the Cherokee language, because I attended an all-white high school (other than me and one actual Indian).
But let me tell you what a Cherokee can tell you about life at Miami University. The first is that Miami tries hard. I don’t want to just drag our administration through the dirt. An effort has been made, relationships have been forged with the tribe that once called the land where the university sits home. I’ve already mentioned the amazing work of my colleagues at the Myaamia Center. Miami tries.
The issue that often emerges, with all respect due, is academics like to pat themselves a little too hard on the back. There is still a major diversity problem on our campus. The way Miami has handled DE&I has been spotty, and the new name given to the initiatives includes the words “transformative” and “excellence,” which doesn’t actually describe the efforts of a largely white campus with a largely white faculty and a predominantly white administration and Board of Trustees. And we’ve had 51 years of good relations with the Miami Tribe (in Oklahoma– I haven’t heard any updates on how our relationship with the Indiana Miami Tribe have gone), but a simple touch of math will show you that 1809– our first year– was more than fifty years ago, and if you consider the history, at one point there were Miami University classes while the tribe was being forcefully relocated off these lands. That doesn’t mean you should all feel shame. It means all of us– myself included– need to earn accolades like “transformative” and “excellent.” What Miami has done is “behave like citizens of the world who want to make good,” but I realize no university’s branding office is going to allow for the creation of the Doing Some Stuff, Trying Hard But Need to be Better Office of Diversity.
So let me share with you what I see, as a Cherokee scholar and educator, someone who has spent at least forty of his forty-six years alive aware of the differences in how his people are/were treated. I realize there’s a way to read what I’ve written here and think I’ve said some powerfully negative things, but the feeling I have, every day at Miami University, is that we do amazing things. And we can continue to do amazing things. What we have to watch out for is the false belief that we’ve done enough, or that we need to be celebrated for what we’ve done so far.
Respecting people, respecting cultures, and helping each other isn’t a thing we do for a little while so we can say “look, we did good!” and it’s a thing to be proud of, but you shouldn’t expect an award or to be able to claim you beat racism, or you reversed the damage done by generations of neglect.
One of the reasons I’ve been so active in the Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM, our family, my “tribe” to use one of the stereotypical phrases I tend to warn people against) is because the philosophy of FAM is more like the philosophy of the Cherokee than that of the University as it stands. FAM is about us. It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s about all of us. And until Miami University is truly about all of us, listening to each other, working with each other, helping to raise each other up, it will forever bear the stain of a white institution that invaded, claimed land, and built a thing that doesn’t pay honor to the people whose world was erased so Miami could stand where it stands. That’s what is owed. Not platitudes, not holidays, not fancy names for programs on diversity. This place has to belong to all of us. Then it pays the debts from the past.
As a Cherokee, I know how and when to raise my voice. I know that the things I say will sometimes upset others, will disrupt some of the classic ways a university works and thinks about itself. But I also know that the way I teach, the way I interact, the way I construct programs and recruit students, makes Miami a better place. The ways I am different add to the quality of the university. The same is true of my African-American colleagues, of the various members of our fantastic Global Studies communities, of my brave, almost impossible-to-drag-down LGBTQ+ students who face things I can never imagine.
So in short, I love you, Miami. Every day in Oxford should be Indigenous People’s Day, and Women’s History Month, and Black History Month, and Pride, and all the other celebrations of what makes us all different, unique, and part of the beautiful tapestry that is Miami University. Some of you are here for four years. Some of us are here for the long haul. But while we’re here, Miami is what we make it. And if a poor kid from a warring tribe can stand in a classroom here and lecture about the value of remembering whose land we continually build Miami on, we all belong, and we all have a voice, and we all get to tell our story.
We are Miami. Hug someone today and remind them that this is our thing. Miami isn’t yours. It’s not mine. It doesn’t belong to the Board of Trustees, to a Dean, to President Crawford. It doesn’t belong to the people whose names are on the buildings. It doesn’t belong to Big Ben or to Paul Ryan. America took Oxford from a tribe, but we bear their name and owe it to the people that were nearly erased to be equitable, to be engaged, to be welcoming. Miami is all of us. You are my people. I am one of you. We do this together. Any other answer is sacrilege.
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