For All The People Who call Tejas Home plaque
How Indigenous histories are honored, remembered, and hidden on campus.
Southwestern is located on Indigenous peoples' traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands, and students, faculty, and staff have been working to bring awareness to this legacy for years. While President Trombley acknowledges this at all public events and the University is developing an official Land Acknowledgement Statement, this modest and often overlooked plaque near the upper-class dorms is currently the only place-bound memorialization calling attention to the legacy of settler-colonialism on campus.
To anyone who knows the history of Texas, it is no secret that the state is located on Indigenous peoples' traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands. As it relates to Southwestern itself, Southwestern is located on land that was home to the Tonkawa, Comanche, and Jumano peoples.
This land was colonized first by Spain and Mexico before it was colonized by Anglo Texans, entangling Southwestern’s history with the history and ongoing legacies of settler-colonialism. This fact is not something obvious to everyday inhabitants of campus today, and it is something we as a community are just now starting to reckon with.
If you have been to any recent university-wide event, you have heard President Trombley refer to this, but unlike many other universities in Texas and throughout the U.S., Southwestern has not adopted an official Land Acknowledgment Statement.
In a recent email to campus about construction on campus and projected changes to campus, Trombley stated, “This land holds great historical and spiritual significance and we pledge to respect and teach about the traditions and culture of the original inhabitants as well as to be caring environmental stewards.” Additionally, she states “We can’t change history, but we can listen to it, and honor the stories it tells. In all the changes you see on campus, I hope you also see that we are building spaces for community, that we are working to preserve the natural environment where we can, and to restore it where possible. As we build and grow, we do so with a commitment to the values of equity and respect.”
While the current changes made to the environment are largely infrastructural and utility-based, I wonder how exactly SU plans to uphold this pledge of teaching and honoring within the physical/spatial environment itself.
As Southwestern begins to expand its infrastructure out onto the 500+ contiguous acres of largely unused land to the east and north of campus, questions arise about what it means to call this “Southwestern’s land,” as well as what purpose this land serves now, what it will serve in the future, and how it served others in the past.
As of now, the communications about this Indigenous history are mostly internal. The only external note I could find regarding it came from Southwestern’s “Land Development Value Statement” page, in which one bullet point recognizes the history as “complex.” None of the written recognition, internal or external, references the specific Indigenous tribes who inhabited the land, nor do they acknowledge the way Southwestern has benefited from the taking of that land.
There is one physical place-based memory site related to this that currently resides on Southwestern’s campus. Southwest of the Dorothy Lord Residential Center is an outdoor area with three picnic tables. On the ground near these tables and off the sidewalk lies a plaque, dedicated “For All Peoples who call Tejas Home.” It was provided by the Indigeneity Paideia Cohort in April 2014.
This site serves to resist the dominant Anglo history of both Southwestern and the larger state of Texas by dedicating a space for marginalized voices who also call Texas home: Indigenous, Mexican, Tejano, African-American, and all others who played a part in our land’s history. Significantly, the plaque was the result of student activism, not an official institutional act. The plaque also gives thanks to the SU SEED funds, which is the result of an initiative created by students, faculty, and staff.
Although this space is resistive and cements a multi-lensed history into the physical landscape, it goes fairly unnoticed today by the current campus community. It is located in a space on campus coded as residential, where faculty, leaders, and administrative staff rarely venture. Moreover, even though it is in student space, not once have I seen students sitting at or using the picnic tables, as the area is located directly outside of a residential staff member’s housing.
Additionally, the plaque is turned away from the sidewalk (see image below). This makes the space circular and enclosed; the plaque is only to be read by those sitting at the tables and within the space, rather than by those walking on the sidewalk. This small but significant detail works to communicate to the Southwestern community that this history is not shouted from the rooftops, but instead delicately placed for only some to see or notice, and only because a group of students and faculty organized to make it happen.
Although this physical memory place is a great start that other histories lack, Southwestern has a long way to go in wrestling with the complex histories embedded in our inhabitation of this land.
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