After growing up on the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the U.S., Tianna Young (CAS ’25) never expected to find a robust Indigenous community when she came to Georgetown. Still, the university community’s lack of awareness about issues facing the Indigenous community disappointed her.
“Do they really think that we all just like, wiped out in a genocide, or what is going on here? Because it is a little shocking,” she said.
This Native American Heritage Month felt no different. On Nov. 1, Georgetown sent students an email linked to the “Celebrating Native American Culture and Heritage at Georgetown” webpage. The site lists six D.C.-based events, none of which occurred at Georgetown or were sponsored by the university.
This is in sharp contrast to Georgetown’s offerings for other cultural heritage months this academic year. Georgetown sponsored eight events for LGBTQIA+ Heritage Month just a month earlier, in October, and provided information about five more events being held in the District. Georgetown also hosted nine events to recognize Hispanic Heritage Month in September.
“Georgetown supports student group and faculty programming for many heritage months throughout the year, including through monetary support to student groups,” a university spokesperson wrote to the Voice, when asked for clarification about the lack of official events for Native American Heritage Month.
“It is up to the student group to decide if and when they want to use this funding for event programming.”
The lack of formal events during Native American Heritage Month is just one example of Georgetown’s lack of recognition of its Native students and Indigenous Studies, according to Young. The lack of recognition is further complicated by Georgetown’s location.
Georgetown occupies the traditional homeland of the Piscataway Conoy and Anacostan or Nacotchtank people who were forcibly removed by colonists. The Piscataway Conoy Tribe was officially recognized by Maryland in 2012 but remains unrecognized at the federal level.
Hope Khodaei (SCS ’27), a Piscataway Conoy Tribal Citizen, recognizes the importance of the presence of Native students like her on campus.
“I’m at Georgetown for a reason, and this reason was for me to continue my undergraduate studies and to help open doors for the Piscataway people and for all Indigenous people from North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean,” she said.
Georgetown is home to an Indigenous Studies Working Group, which is co-convened by Professors Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, who studies groups indigenous to Siberia, and Bette Jacobs, a voting member of Cherokee Nation. According to its website, the group “gathers together colleagues and students interested in the field of Indigenous Studies,” however, it is not part of an official Indigenous Studies Department, certificate, or minor. It primarily serves as a resource guide to share information about events, classes, and professors with a focus on Indigenous studies. Meanwhile, at least 12 other universities ranked alongside Georgetown as top 25 colleges offer minors, majors, or concentrations in Indigenous or Native Studies.
Much of the work around organizing and supporting Indigenous students falls on other students, including the Circle of Indigenous Students’ Alliance (CISA), formerly known as the Native American Student Council, said Young, who joined the organization during her sophomore year.
“A lot of my senior members used to say that we do the work of really like an administrative body on campus, rather than a bigger, typical student organization,” Young said. “And that’s because of the advocacy we have to do. There’s not a plethora of us to kind of really voice certain things. So if you want something done, you kind of have to keep going at it.”
In 2021, the then-Native American Student Council launched a petition calling on the university to issue a land acknowledgement and recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Today, the university has still not adopted a formal land acknowledgement and the university calendar lists Indigenous Peoples’ Day—still referred to by some as Columbus Day—as a “Mid-Semester Holiday.” Some organizations within the university, including the GUTS schedule, do acknowledge the holiday as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The Voice did not find any official mentions of “Columbus Day.”
According to statistics published by Georgetown, only five undergraduate students identified as “American Indian or Alaska Native, non-Hispanic” during the 2022-2023 school year—0.068% of all undergraduate students. About 2% of the U.S. population identifies as Native American.
English Professor Lisbeth Fuisz, who teaches a course on Native American literature, encourages students to think critically about why those numbers are so small.
“It’s sort of built into our culture, our larger mainstream culture, this sort of erasure of Indigenous peoples,” she said. “There’s a reason that there’s also small populations of Native people, because of this long history of genocide.”
Young is hopeful that, with work, Georgetown can become a more inclusive destination for Indigenous students.
“[CISA’s] focus has shifted more towards trying to build up Georgetown as a place where Native students can apply and see themselves—kind of like the opposite of what my application process was—but can apply to Georgetown and see it as a place where they can not only thrive in their culture, but also feel accepted and supported,” Young said.
Some members of the Georgetown community have made efforts to engage with the next generation of Native college students. Jacobs has gone on recruitment trips to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. The Center for Social Justice hosts an annual visit for high school students from Maȟpíya Lúta, formerly the Red Cloud Jesuit School, located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Professors and students emphasized the work they are doing to improve conditions for current Indigenous Georgetown students, but stressed that there is a long way to go in terms of representation and access.
“I think beginning with the Piscataway, starting that narrative is the way to go. And I think with the programs that CISA are having and with the support we’re getting, I’m hoping that would change,” Khodaei said.
Professor Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, who is of both Luiseño and Cupeño descent, taught in Georgetown’s philosophy department for four years before accepting a position at the University of Maryland, where she now runs the Indigenous Futures Lab.
Nahwilet Meissner is working to bring Indigenous scholarship to the forefront by building a local consortium of universities to support Indigenous scholarship. Georgetown is not involved at this time, she said.
“As of right now, we don’t have any partnerships with Georgetown, as there is no Indigenous studies department, no Tribal Liaison, or faculty mentors for the Native student group (since we last checked),” Nahwilet Meissner wrote to the Voice. “When I tried to build these connections from within Georgetown, I was also not supported by any university resources.”
Like all student organizations affiliated with the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), CISA has a faculty and student advisor from the Advisory Board for Student Organizations, but they are each responsible for advising multiple clubs.
When asked about the consortium Nahwilet Meissner mentioned, a Georgetown spokesperson reiterated that the university is committed to work that supports Indigenous scholarship.
“The university is extremely supportive of exploring programming, and course options that share our diversity, equity and inclusion values, and reflect the broad interests of our students,” the spokesperson wrote.
Nahwilet Meissner encouraged students to challenge professors and administrators to include more Indigenous voices in the curriculum and work to expand the number of Indigenous students on campus.
“Students, with the political power that they have, I think, should engage with these heritage months by asking the harder questions of the administration, asking the harder questions of their departments. Why are there these glaring absences when it comes to Indigenous voices?” Nahwilet Meissner said.
Fuisz believes this lack of representation is due to a societal willful ignorance toward Indigenous people and studies.
“I think in a lot of ways, the way our society is set up is not to educate people on these issues,” she said. “I think it’s really important that individually, each of us can sort of educate ourselves in whatever way that makes sense to the person, so that we’re not participating in that sort of active erasure of Native communities, of Native students.”
As for the message of November?
“The major message that an awful lot of people want to get across during this symbolic month is the basic one: we are still here,” Mandelstam Balzer said, “But it’s not only we are still here, it’s that we are here and doing a lot more than surviving.”
