Welcome to the Macalester EJ hub

We would like to take a moment to honor the fact that we are on Dakota land. This is the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people who were forcibly exiled from the land because of aggressive and persistent settler colonialism. We make this acknowledgment to honor the Dakota people, ancestors, and descendants, as well as the land itself.

We recognize that this acknowledgment is but a first step in recognizing and dismantling aggressive and persistent policies of settler colonialism that continue to oppress to this day. The work of acknowledgement must be paired with active practices like the amplification of Indigenous voices and land repatriation in order to be substantive and meaningful.

Jennings Mergenthal class of 2021, wrote this land acknowledgement in collaboration with members of PIPE (Proud Indigneous Peoples for Education) and the DML (Department of Multicultural Life).  Since 2015, Indigenous students have demanded land acknowledgements across campus spaces. We view this land acknowledgement not only as an important introduction to the Enviornmental Justice Hub, but an important piece of work within the EJ movement at Macalester, a representation of the work students have done to hold the Macalester institution accountable.

This EJ-centered toolkit was originally created by students in Professor Kirisitina Sailiata's 2022 Environmental Justice class and has since been updated and maintained by the Environmental Studies department's student Anti-Racism Fellow. Our goal with this toolkit is to better define what Environmental Justice means at Macalester in an effort to connect activism at our institution to that in the greater Twin Cities area, the state of Minnesota, the US, and globally. Together, we are uncovering our college's historical and present day connections to the land and its students. 

While this toolkit is here to spark conversations about environmental (in)justice on Macalester College’s campus and beyond, conversations on their own are not enough. The resources are here to assist readers as they begin to critically involve themselves in the EJ movement. The resources will help readers better understand how to form and find communities centered on environmental justice: those which resist the violence and harm of environmental degradation, colonization, racism, heteropatriarchy, and economic injustice. 

Finally, we ask that you use the Environmental Justice Hub to mobilize; to take this toolkit off the page and into your communities. Since many of the case studies pertain to Macalester College and the ways in which it actively participates in colonization and environmental injustice, we ask that you critically examine Macalester to uncover the various ways in which this institution upholds and perpetuates a legacy of violence. Using those critiques, we can move forward and push for collective action that challenges that violence. Drawing upon the legacy of student activism on this campus, and the work of BIPOC activists in Minnesota and beyond, critical action is feasible, and new worlds and institutions that emulate Environmental Justice are possible.