CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SLAVERY AND JUSTICE
A Place to Learn
LAND AND LABOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice (CSSJ) and Brown University, are located in Providence, Rhode Island, on lands that are within the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. We acknowledge that beginning with colonization and continuing for centuries the Narragansett Indian Tribe have been dispossessed of most of their ancestral lands in Rhode Island by the actions of individuals and institutions. We acknowledge our responsibility to understand and respond to those actions. The Narragansett Indian Tribe, whose ancestors stewarded these lands with great care, continues as a sovereign nation today. We commit to working together to honor our past and build our future with truth. For more information on Brown University's land acknowledgment and it’s development process, please visit Brown University Land Acknowledgment
The Work and Ideas of the Center
We use the year 1492 as our point of departure for thinking about the entangled and yet distinctive histories of Indigenous Peoples and Black People.
The past and present-day experiences of people Indigenous to this territory as well as the experiences of African Americans exist in opposition to the dominant conceptions of settler colonialism, slavery, race, and their legacies that inform the contemporary myth of what America was and is today.
The United States, the city of Providence and, by extension, Brown University’s existence and legacy would not be possible without the genocide, displacement, enslavement, and erasure of Native People and the forced labor of enslaved Black People. We acknowledge, respect, and honor those whose lives allow us to work, live, and learn in the present. We would like to honor the Indigenous voices who have fought for centuries and continue to fight for human dignity and sovereignty. We hold sacred the people whose lives have made this work possible. We recognize the ways in which racial slavery has shaped the structures of the present.
Land and labor acknowledgments do not exist in a past tense, or historical context: the afterlives of settler colonialism and the legacies of racial slavery are current ongoing processes, and this nation needs to build its mindfulness of its present participation in this ongoing historical process.
THE LAND
Land Acknowledgements are one step towards unsettling and ultimately disrupting colonial structures. We have a responsibility to learn about the lands we are currently occupying, the people that have been displaced from these lands, and those who continue to live on these lands and fight for their sovereignty and rights to the land.
Native Land Digital, whose website is linked below, invites us to start thinking about how we move beyond land acknowledgments and stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and challenge the colonial project we actively participate in.
Pictured behind this text is a seed assemblage curated by Professor Geri Augusto. The symbolic slave garden and its accompanying seed collage “Plants of Bondage/Liberation Flora” were created specifically for the CSSJ as a paired visual essay. Prof. Augusto's intent was to present one dimension of the knowledge of the enslaved — plant knowledge — innovatively, in light of current thinking about perceptual (visual and tactile) knowledge and epistemologies of practice, and to open up conversations on and off-campus, across interdisciplinary fields: environmental studies, American studies, science and society, and of course, Africana studies (particularly with respect to slavery and the historiography of slavery). This project, while imaginative, was intensively research-based in slave history, Africana visual arts, feminist epistemology, African and African-American ideas of nature and the environment, indigenous knowledge studies, and colonial sciences.