As a land grant institution that occupies Lenape and Nanticoke homelands, the University of Delaware is long and deeply entangled with Native American nations from coast to coast. This working group approaches the continuing colonial legacies of our land grant as a critical context for environmental research across the arts, humanities, and sciences. Building from this institutional foundation, we further heed the findings of recent United Nations reports: Locations continuously stewarded by Indigenous peoples represent crucial remaining islands of biodiversity amid the planetary mass extinction event underway. Thus, Indigenous sovereignty, #Landback, and Earth-based epistemologies and are essential to healthy and reparative futures worldwide. At every scale, we seek to examine the history, present, and future of our relationships to Native nations and lands through interdisciplinary and community-based collaboration.
