Land Acknowledgement
Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists. Despite signing a treaty with the United States government that recognized Delaware sovereignty and suggested the possibility of the formation of new state for Indians with representation in congress, and despite the service of Munsee Lenape in the American Revolution, many of the inhabitants of what is now called the Hudson Valley were forced by violence or tricked into giving up their land to white settlers and compelled to migrate West. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians went first to central New York, and later to their present location in Wisconsin; others who now identify as the Delaware Nation were driven through many locations and ultimately to their present homes in Oklahoma and Ontario, Canada. This history remains virtually unknown locally, despite the omnipresence of surrounding place-names derived from Native languages, such as the nearby town of “Wappinger” and even the name of Vassar’s home city, “Poughkeepsie”. The very existence of Pharos depends upon the resources that were obtained by these acts of displacement.
American universities were complicit in the extermination of native peoples and even those schools founded more recently, including Vassar, have reduced Native remains to objects of study and erased Native histories. The history of the complicity of the discipline of Classics and Classical scholars in this violence largely remains to be written. Sixteenth century Spanish colonists turned to the ancient past to justify their imperialism in the Americas. An indigenous student at Harvard, known to history only as “Eleazar,” wrote a poem in Latin that survives only because of its inclusion in a 1702 pamphlet encouraging white people to convert Native people and enslaved Africans to Christianity. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were a popular text in the curriculum of 19th century America schools because it provided a template for the violent conquest of the frontier of a growing empire such as the United States enacted in its westward expansion.
With this acknowledgment, Pharos aims first to express our gratitude to those whose land we occupy and to recognize our complicity in the history of their displacement. We aim to increase awareness of this history, which has too often been erased, even as the descendants of those who first occupied this land have made that history freely available. We seek to recognize not only the historical suffering but also the present vitality of the descendants of the Munsee Lenape people, both those who continue to reside in the northeast and care for their homelands, and those whose ancestors were displaced and yet continue to preserve their culture and traditions, take pride in their institutions and sovereign tribal governments, celebrate the accomplishments of their children, and advocate for compensation for land taken from them and for the repatriation of their artifacts.
Visitors to Pharos are invited to learn about and acknowledge the history and ongoing presence of those whom white settler colonialism displaced in your communities, to support Native Activism around human rights and environmental justice, and to recognize, with Pharos, that a Land Acknowledgement such as this is only a first gesture toward the restoration of tribal stewardship of actual land through the establishment of, for example, native-run conservation groups, the payment of land taxes or “rent” by non-native occupants of indigenous homelands, the payment of royalties by companies whose businesses depend on native knowledge, the transfer of land ownership (including by individuals) to Native American tribes, and many many other means.
