The University of Michigan: Decolonizing Pedagogies Initiative

ABSTRACT:
On September 29th, 1817, Chief Tontagini signed The Treaty of Fort Meigs[11] on behalf of The Three Fire’s Council. This Treaty granted the State of Michigan 640 acres of land to found The University of Michigan in relocation from Detroit to Ann Arbor in 1837. Furthermore, Article 16 of the Fort Meigs Treaty states Chief Tontagini gives this land under the pretense that his community, the Anishinaabek, be educated by The University of Michigan. Upsettingly, there was no evidence of any Indigenous person receiving this promised education from The University of Michigan for 130 years after opening in 1837. Fall semester of 2020, about 10 undergraduate Native American Student Association E-board and Core seek to gain overdue accountability from the University of Michigan and demand justice for the needs of all Indigenous peoples neglected by the structure of Michigan’s Academia.

SCOPE:
Decolonizing Pedagogies Initiative | Globalizing accessibility of Higher Education by decolonizing pedagogies that naturally lend itself a more diverse population and a more inclusive system; Providing a sustainable campus climate capable of enabling the growth, equity, and success of not only Global Indigenous students but all University of Michigan students; Developing student success programming and curriculum to acknowledge and reflect cultural, ancestral, spiritual, and physical interrelationship of Indigenous reciprocity with the natural world and their genealogy; Curriculum mapping to reflect the mirror identity of natural landscape and Indigenous communities; Redirecting education from settler-colonial maintenance pertaining to areas of teaching style, social learning, embodied learning, experiential learning, analytics of emotions, cross over learning, ubiquitous learning, computational thinking, assessment and recursive feedback, multimodal education, collaborative intelligence, multicultural education, intersectionality, foundational teaching skills, differentiated learning, specialized knowledge and future-facing education; Process of recognizing Global Indigenous students as inseparable from their diverse ontology and epistemology in Higher Education’s systems of research, curriculum, recruitment and retention programming; DEDICATE THIS PROGRAM TO CENTRALIZING INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS ON CAMPUS. STOP SPREADING OUR ELDERS, COMMUNITIES, FACULTY, STUDENT AND STAFF MEMBERS THIN.