Beyond the Land Acknowledgement
Meagan Solomon opened our Reckoning with Settler Colonialism in Higher Ed Symposium with this powerful statement that goes beyond the Land Acknowledgement. We thank her for sharing it here. Read below:
While we are meeting virtually for this symposium, it is important to know that the land TCU resides on is an open wound of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, including the Waco, Tawakoni, Taovaya and Kichai peoples. I call it an open wound because the violence of settler colonialism is alive and ongoing, never fully healed or forgotten.
This open wound can be traced to the 16th century, when Spanish and French colonizers disrupted the ways of life and land of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes by forcing their migration, spreading dangerous diseases, and creating tension between tribes--ultimately resulting in mass genocide. In the early to mid 1800s, white settlers violently displaced the Wichita, Waco, Tawakoni, Taovaya, and Kichai peoples from their reservations on the Brazos River and Washita River. Confederate soldiers then forced them to migrate to Kansas in 1863, where they faced mass starvation amidst smallpox and cholera epidemics. Despite resistance, white settlers occupied Indigenous lands and separated long-standing communities at the start of the 19th century--inflicting harm that would affect the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes for centuries. Today, the Wichita Tribal History Center in Anadarko, Oklahoma preserves the lives and legacy of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. Despite a long history of displacement, the Wichita, Waco, Tawakoni, Taovaya and Kichai peoples continue to resist cultural erasure and make their presence known.
The displacement of Indigenous peoples is intimately bound up in the enslavement of African peoples. The city of Fort Worth, where TCU resides, relied on the forced labor of enslaved African peoples when it was violently established in 1849. Just as Confederate soldiers violently displaced the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, so too did they displace and enslave African peoples. In 1873, TCU was founded by Addison and Randolph Clark, two Confederate soldiers who fought to uphold slavery. This white supremacist legacy is maintained through the commemoration of the Clark brothers on TCU’s campus as well as the naming of the AddRan Liberal Arts College. It is also maintained in the classrooms, offices, and university spaces of those who prioritize white and Eurocentric perspectives at the expense of all Black and brown peoples and knowledges.
The same white supremacist logics undergirding the founding of TCU and other universities persist into the present, though many working in higher education do not name or acknowledge this fact directly. Settler colonialism and enslavement are not phantoms of a faraway past but rather very present and ongoing violences which require our critical attention and action today. This includes a reckoning with settler colonial logics in higher education and an ever-present carceral state which both rely on the oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples. It also requires that we actively recognize and respect all the ways Indigenous and Black peoples continue to disrupt and reimagine the intertwined forces of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and carcerality which the academy is built on.
I offer this information as an entry point into our keynote discussion with karen and Leigh today and as an invitation to what I hope will be an active, lifelong reckoning.
