Restoring Institutional Memory: Narrating MIT’s role in Indigenous genocide
This is a live blog account from the event Restoring Institutional Memory: Narrating MIT’s role in Indigenous genocide, Presented by Dr. David Shane Lowry, Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies, MIT History, along with his students and hosted by the Digital Humanities Workshop and the MIT Libraries. A live blog captures a live account of an event with minimal post-event editing. Any errors or disjunctures are solely the responsibility of the live-blogger.
Dr. Lowry started by thanking Alvin Harvey, Nancy Dalrymple, and other students from his class. Dr. Lowry was recently walking through campus and trying to remember MIT, not as he experiences it now but as a former student. He learned to think about the world here at MIT. He thought about things that were commonplace for him in 2005–6. He returned to the physical space and asked “How does MIT exist and teach us things about how it exists?” He was walking in the hallways and saw Ellen Swallow Richards. The plaque lists her as being someone who was an expert in Home Economics — it domesticates her and makes her feminine. She was one of the foremost experts in mining in the 1800s. Her husband was also an expert in “mining engineering.” Corporations looked to them for advice about how they should do their business in the 1800s. But the sign makes her about home economics and doesn’t place her in a central role as a central corporate figure in mining engineering in the late 1800s.
The picture of Swallow has been altered by Dr. Lowry on his iPhone. We have students, young people, that look up information and grab information. He shows things like “Copy”, “Lookup” — ways that you can use your iPhone to interact with physical objects like this plaque in space. This is where humanities and social sciences meet computer science. This is the image that was used to promote this event (see above).
Student Alvin Harvey and Dr. Lowry took photos for a story for the Associated Press that was widely shared across the world.
It was even shared by the Cherokee Nation, a group that opposes federal recognition for the Lumbee Tribe, Dr. Lowry’s people. He and Alvin were staring into the sun. The reporter said, “I want you to look like you are REALLY having this conversation.” [laughter from the audience] The photographer had him on the steps of Walker Memorial and a woman student fell on the ground. Dr. Lowry called the police and they said it wasn’t their job. MIT Medical said go in the building and get the nurses. He asked the nurses why the police thought it wasn’t their job. They said “That’s how it is.” The photographer looked at Dr. Lowry and said, “This is sort of emblematic of what you are investigating right?” He replied, “It is.”
Francis Amasa Walker becomes an important figure designing reservations in the US in the 1800’s. He brought unhealthy foods as commodities into reservations. The Walker Building is now falling down. Do we take seriously the conditions of suffering and colonialism that define the space that we are in right now?
After the article came out people from around the country called Dr. Lowry and asked how it’s going. Dr. Lowry replies to all, “we are in the middle of it.” Also after the article came out, Dr. Lowry received a death threat. He had commented about his own bow tie. The death threat email from a person in MA who did not hide his identity said “There are other braided things that we can wrap around their neck.”
[Dr. Lowry pauses, The room pauses]
This person, with his full identity on the email, had made a death threat. Dr. Lowry sent it to the police who handled it. The person who wrote it was not apologetic about it and said “MIT should consider who they should have representing them.” The emailer hated the fact that we were having this conversation here.
Martha, who works in the president’s office, recently told Dr. Lowry that the hard part of having this conversation is that when she tells people about it people are surprised that there ARE Native people at MIT. Dr. Lowry says this is how we have to start — to have people understand that we are here. One of Dr. Lowry’s students framed this as “the presence of absence.” Their topic, and who they are at MIT, is made absent. As students, Indigenous students are often ignored. A lot of initiatives that came out of MIT are not FOR Native people or Indigenous communities. There are parts of MIT that are engaging with Indigenous people like the SOLVE program. But they are just a small example and are not in an official space in the university. They are not institutionalized. Overwhelmingly Native people seem to not exist — the presence of absence.
Dr. Lowry’s talk is structured around three absences: Mind, Hand and Heart. (This is a play on MIT’s Latin motto “Mind and Hand” … which has in recent years been unofficially changed by MIT’s leadership into “Mind, Hand, and Heart”).
The artwork depicted here is showcasing a moment in time. As a scholar of race, Dr. Lowry sees that all the people are white. One of the panels shows a child being led forward by allegorical figures of Reason and Compassion. “We” are represented by the naked child. Another panel with all men, has, in Latin, “And ye shall be as gods” (which is based on a verse in The Book of Genesis in the Bible). Science is represented by a white man in a white coat. One hand is in a pot that represents good and one in a pot that represents evil. For Nina, one of Dr. Lowry’s students, this panel tries to elevate MIT to the status of God.
Dr. Lowry says that people at MIT simply think we do good. Why do we think that? He approached COUHES at the beginning of the year and asked what they have done to protect Indigenous people in research. He asked them to look for studies that had worked with Indigenous people. COUHES said they cannot. Dr. Lowry asked about a specific researcher who does work with Native people’s genomic information. COUHES said that because that person is between institutions then there could have been other research boards that vetted him.
The students in Dr. Lowry’s class are asking the Provost, President and administration to create a panel of Indigenous people to vet research that relates to Indigenous communities. If you are not from Indigenous community then you will not know what is good or bad for Indigenous community.
Dr. Lowry talks about how there is a tendency at MIT to hide within our work. He talks about the DuPont family. Two brothers sat on the corporation at the same time. They created faculty lines, and created various research priorities. Their wealth came, in part, from dynamite used in the demolition of Indigenous land, waterways and ecosystems throughout California. In the late 1800s and early 1900s the dynamite industry was big business via the work of Alfred Nobel (whose name is used for Nobel Prizes).
Dr. Lowry talks about how, on Indigenous People’s Day 2021, MIT communications were focused on how MIT economists had won Nobel prizes, prizes funded by and named for Indigenous genocide (via the dynamite industry of the late 1800s). Awards rooted in Indigenous genocide were the focus on Indigenous People’s Day…instead of Indigenous community at MIT.
Dr. Lowry returns to the story of Ellen Swallow Richards. She was the first woman admitted to MIT and also the first elected to membership in the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering. In fact, she was in the center of the economy of mining engineering, the origins of Course 3, now Materials Science. Mining engineering (and, eventually, Course 3) were the direct result of MIT’s profiting from its land holdings from the Morrill Acts of 1862 & 1890. What were the Morrill Acts? Well, they gave MIT access to land from 82 American Indian nations. MIT stole and profited from this Indigenous land. We (MIT) have continued to be funded through money that was generated by the stealing of American Indian land since 1862.
Ellen Swallow Richards — as representative of MIT, she traveled to the lands MIT got through the Morrill Act of 1862. She also went up into Canada and became one of the foremost experts in determining the quality of nickel and starting a nickel boom there. Indigenous communities have been trying to get mining rights back from companies ever since Richards had been advising those companies in the late 1800s.
MIT is always touting Richards as “the first woman.” Dr. Lowry shows the tiles in the Kendall T station that narrate MIT history. Dr Francis Amasa Walker is there. So is Robert Taylor. Taylor created a new way of looking at architecture in the US. The Morrill Act of 1890 established a number of HBCUs. MIT had a small cohort of Black students who came in and Taylor was the first to graduate from MIT. MIT praises his graduation. It became a US postal stamp several years ago. Booker T. Washington, who Taylor worked with, was recruited to run the Tuskegee Institute. Washington also, before he led Tuskegee, ran a boarding school at Hampton (Virginia) where Native children were stolen from their families and communities.
Dr. Lowry tells the story of Joseph Applegate, who was the subject of a book where the Black experience at MIT was foregrounded. Applegate also said he was Native but that part of his identity was erased. Why was his Native identity erased or hidden underneath a story of Black community at MIT?
In 2006, Dr. Lowry spoke at the MLK breakfast. It was an emotional day. The person who asked him to speak (Dean Leo Osgood) hugged him afterwards and said “that is what I was hoping you would say.” Osgood had asked him to speak because, as he told Lowry, “the genocide of Native people has to stop”.
Dr. Lowry shows pictures of the six new DEI deans at MIT. None of them are American Indian — why? He wonders why Diversity, Inclusion and Equity isn’t centered around Indigenous peoples.
Dr. Lowry thought back to his student experience with the Committee on Academic Performance (CAP) which does not provide Indigenous mentorship (e.g. the presence of Indigenous faculty) nor considers the nuances of students’ Indigeneity as part of their academic evaluations. Instead, Dr. Lowry asks us to consider how MIT Medical (counseling within MIT Medical) was used as a way for MIT to remove itself from responsibility to Indigenous student life at MIT. (He asserts that Indigenous peoples often don’t accept clinical counseling…and that this points to the need for a more authentic Indigenous community at MIT in the form of Indigenous student support, permanent Indigenous faculty, Indigenous leaders, etc.)
Audience Q&A
Audience member: You give too much credit to the leadership of MIT. They don’t know what they are doing most of the time. She never noticed where the CAP was. She bets that they simply just had space. She suggests coming up with an explanation that incorporates the incompetence of MIT.
Another audience member: Appreciate sharing the knowledge. You have given a beautiful visual map of what to pay attention to. You referenced a shift over time — from student to Native Studies fellow. Is there any story about how you noticed things differently when you came to the memorials themselves?
Dr. Lowry: Building 10 with all the names of people in the military. He caught himself in that space looking. When he was an undergrad he would do that a lot. In the absence of Indigenous names and people, the people that were here were not only present but elevated. I was staring at it in the same way but my ability to critique has improved. MIT likes to be normal — you can expect something from MIT. In the preservation of the status quo — this is where we as the Institute lose the ability to help, to heal, to restore. The falling-down structures, like Walker, are emblematic of other structures falling down.
The more Dr. Lowry has conversations at MIT he finds MIT longs for community. Community, especially Indigenous community, helps to hold people accountable, to fix individual things and community things, for each other. MIT must commit to fixing things in community.
Audience member: I have recently met Charles Shadle. Are you and the class identifying other Indigenous faculty/TAs/graduate students who haven’t identified themselves? Building awareness and education with them?
Dr. Lowry says he got an email early in the year from an alumni from the 80s who never identified himself as Native because “MIT wasn’t ready for it.” There was also a woman from the Seminole tribe who was a tenure-track faculty but left after the first year. The alumni are coming to them and telling them their stories. These are difficult conversations and conversations that have to be protected. They have to be gathered in community and vetted before they could be made public.
One Native student audience member talks about how they have a new space for Native students and they reach out to new students and offer them a space to be in community, especially since MIT is such an intense place.
Nichol speaks: “I am David’s wife. I was accepted to MIT in 2002. But MIT wouldn’t engage in any conversations around (increasing) financial aid.” She hopes that things will change for future Native students at MIT.
Dr. Lowry: There needs to be overt infrastructure and funding to have relationships with Indigenous peoples. There needs to be a center, program or college of Indigenous life.
Student from Dr. Lowry’s class: There is a certain amount of remedial education that needs to be done for ppl from the American school system. The genocide that was involved in the founding of our nation. Some of the people they have worked with haven’t heard of Indigenous science as a thing, or that people who are Indigenous have PhDs.
Audience member: Applauds Dr. Lowry for the conversation. It’s like building a city piece by piece. “It is like you are leading a ‘start-up’.” She makes a plea for everyone to get numbers, good numbers.
