The Importance of Recognizing Stolen Land
Moving from home to college for the first time is filled with an overabundance of new experiences. Every step through the freshman dorms, dining halls and classrooms provides the chance to meet someone new.
Commonly, a natural conversation starter begins with, “Where are you from?” Many of the answers come from the northeast U.S., with three of the top states for Elon undergraduate enrollment being Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey.
This home state familiarity provides a sense of comfort when students are experiencing a massive life change. For the eight Native American students that are a part of the Elon community, this reassuring feeling of a familiar face is borderline nonexistent.
Image taken by Joseph Navin. Crystal Cavalier-Keck, an Alamance County native and a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation speaks inside the McBride Gathering Space at Elon University on Feb. 8, 2023.
On Wednesday, February 8, Crystal Cavalier-Keck, Becca Bishopric Patterson, Sakura Patutahi Kawakami Potaka-Dewes and Aubee Billie commented on their personal experiences with the intersection of land rights and their faith amongst indigenous communities during the first Winterfaith panel discussion of the semester.
Potaka-Dewes and Billie are both current undergraduate students with entirely different indigenous backgrounds. Yet, they found comfort in their friendship with each other.
Potaka-Dewes is a first-year student from the Te Arawa and Ngati Porou indigenous tribes of New Zealand. Growing up, her cultural values were instilled in her from birth. She attended a full Maori (term for the indigenous people of New Zealand) school where she learned the Maori language and history.
The implementation of Maori schools throughout New Zealand is one way that the indigenous community is regaining their land, and Potaka-Dewes’ family played a major role in that endeavor. In 1975, her grandparents helped to lead the Maori Land March on Parliament to ask the government to halt further loss of Maori land.
Billie is a second-year student and an ambassador of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. In Brighton, Florida, she lives on a reservation in a traditional indigenous home called a Chickee. Her dedication to her community has earned her the position to be re-crowned Jr. Miss Florida Seminole in 2023.
Here at Elon, she always remembers to wake up in the morning facing east with her feet facing west. Waking in the direction that the sun rises is a traditional Seminole Tribe practice. Land justice is something that is very important to Billie.
The Florida Everglades are the Seminole Tribe’s sacred land because that is where they hid from colonizers years ago. Now, the Everglades are becoming a political project as the government is trying to re-route them.
“The government is trying to take away our sovereignty,” Billie said. “The tribes only have so much land.”
One common denominator that Potaka-Dewes and Billie stressed was the importance of researching an area. Often, the original historical sources came from the indigenous people, but stolen land is erasing that.
The loss of their people’s history has made transitioning to a new place the most striking culture shock for both Billie and Potaka-Dewes. Feeling at home at Elon is a constant struggle for indigenous students. However, education on indigenous cultures is the first step toward integration.
The Edge urges readers to take this issue into serious consideration. Learn more about all cultures, not just one.