By MARTY LEVINE
Pitt’s Native American Studies Working Group began meeting again this week after forming last year to explore how Native American scholarship and support should and could take place at the University.
The group has met with faculty from Native American Studies at West Virginia University, with members of the once-local Seneca tribe in New York, and with fellow faculty, staff and students on campus to explore the questions: What Native American scholarship is already happening at Pitt? How would Native American studies benefit the University community? What local resources can be mustered and how might they support teaching, programming and research?
For the past five years, Pitt has sponsored an annual Indigenous Cultural Festival on campus (this year 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 24, on the William Pitt Union patio and lawn) celebrating both local and national, historical and current, Native American culture.
Regionally, the Annual Pow Wow hosted by the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center is set for Sept. 26 and 27 in Dorseyville, north of Pittsburgh, featuring Native American singing, drumming, dancing, and other arts and crafts, as well as native foods.
The working group supports both events. But much of its future direction remains in the air, say group founder Mark Kramer, an English faculty member, and active member Alaina Roberts, a history faculty member.
Kramer was inspired to start the group after teaching a summer study abroad course in South Dakota called “Lakota Perspectives” over several recent years. Students spent each day in the local community, working on a cattle ranch and helping with local ceremonies and youth programs. It was, he says, his entry into “culture, history, current injustices experienced on the Pine Ridge Reservation.” Although he is not of Native American heritage, he found himself “wanting to do more on campus and also responsibly to address Native American studies as a discipline and as a justice issue.”
Roberts, who has both Chickasaw and Choctaw heritage, has a research focus on Black and Native American history, including publishing her first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. She is currently writing a personal history of the Chickasaw Nation. But such scholarship focuses on experiences in these tribes’ current lands in Oklahoma.
“What can I do for the Pittsburgh community?” she asks. “Pitt does not have enough faculty doing native scholarship” or enough with connection to the community, she believes. Nor is there an active Pitt student or faculty group for those with Native American heritage. So the new working group seemed a good way to meet others with a similar focus and provide a better sense of what Pitt is doing now, she says.
Thus far, says Kramer, “we've been talking about how we can create some basic infrastructure, a newsletter,” a website (https://pitt.libguides.com/nastudies), and opportunities to join the group (email NASWG@pitt.edu). Its members may start to bring in speakers, partner for programming with the Seneca nation, start a reading group, or explore a certificate program.
But having Native American studies here, with or without a full-fledged program “would take investment from the University,” Roberts says. The working group has already received an Innovation in Education Award from the provost’s office to fund its beginnings.
She adds: “Everywhere in North America has Native American history, but especially Pittsburgh, that we can document” and that is visible in Pitt’s archives, in the Fort Pitt Block House and other local museums. “We definitely have to address this at the University … because you have to know the history of the place you live and work and go to school.”
Roberts’ office, for instance, sits on Bouquet St., named after a Swiss-born British colonel in the French and Indian War. In 1763, during an Indian siege of Fort Pitt, smallpox struck the fort. When Indian emissaries visited the British there to urge surrender, Bouquet infamously decided to give them blankets infected with smallpox when they left.
Kramer also points to the Kinzua dam, conceived after the 1936 flood in Pittsburgh to hold back the Allegheny River upstream but completed only in 1965. It flooded Seneca Nation lands and towns, breaking a protection agreement signed by George Washington, ignoring their protests and proposed alternative plans while forcing their removal to upstate New York and threatening their ability to pass on their heritage and language.
“The Seneca people are one generation removed,” from this event, Kramer says. “These are all live issues. They are not just historical things.”
Zach Davis, director of engagement and wellbeing programs in the Office of Institutional Engagement & Wellbeing — the Pitt sponsor for the Indigenous Cultural Festival this month — said: “We’re grateful for the work Mark is leading through the Native American Studies Working Group and for the care and thought he has brought to advancing this work at Pitt. Creating more opportunities for students, faculty and staff to learn about Native American and Indigenous cultures, histories and contemporary experiences can add real value to the Pitt experience and help broaden the perspectives and voices represented in our learning and community.
“For us, this work is also about connection and creating meaningful ways for people across the University to learn from one another and engage with communities beyond campus."
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.