What was the process of building CAIIS like?

Dennison: What was really powerful about this moment is that no one had a really clear vision of what this needed to be. We got to really decide for ourselves what we wanted to do with this. We spent a lot of time in this process trying to figure out, what does our community really want? What does it really need? I began by taking our Native faculty out to lunch. I'm a huge believer that everything we do needs to be around food.

It was a really big testament to our Native community here that their overall response to this was not, I need this research thing, or I wanna be supported with my book project or any of that. The overarching narrative that came out of these meetings with Native faculty was “for me to stay at UW, what I want is a space where Native students can thrive, where Native community feels welcome, where Native knowledge is valued.” Those became some of the founding missions of the center. 

I also had some conversations that first year with several of our Native alumni and Native leaders in the area--some of which are both--and I talked to them about their time at UW. And a lot of what they would say is, “I just got through.” I heard again and again, especially from Native leaders in the area, that they didn't need to be researched, that was not the primary need that they saw, but they wanted to make sure that the students that they sent to UW were cared for. We've come together as an organization to build community on campus, a community specifically for Native faculty, staff, and students that centers Native knowledge and does that in relationship with Native communities.

The vision is to create a University of Washington that recognizes, values, and strengthens American Indian, Alaska Native, and other Indigenous intellectual traditions, communities, and futures.

How was CAIIS funding raised?

Dennison: That first year, in addition to lunches and going to the Associated Tribes of Northwest Indians and talking with the Native American Advisory Board for OMAD, and other steps that we did, we approached the Mellon Foundation, which is a humanities based foundation that does really cool programming work diversify college campuses. They were interested in supporting our work.

We were able to use the momentum that we had started around these conversations to host three workshops with different constituencies to dream up what programming would look like across campus if it was to be robustly supported. The Mellon Foundation had originally invited us to apply for a $1,000,000 grant that would be spread out over 4 years, which was roughly the amount of money we had. We had about $1,000,000 committed from the university, from the deans and the provost office and various places across all three campuses. We started having conversations with people about what kind of program they wanted to see.

It became clear as we were doing this work that even with another $1,000,000 from the Mellon Foundation, it was not going to be enough to support the kind of robust work that people were asking for here on campus. We went back to the Mellon Foundation and said that we weren't interested in applying for $1,000,000, but that we would be interested in applying for a $1,800,000 grant. They said yes, that they would support us in doing that work.

Native Pathways Program

Dennison: This is partnership work that we're doing to help students, who are typically at 2 year colleges, transfer to the University of Washington. We've done a couple of different projects with this; We've hosted a fellowship so that one of our current or former Native grad students can teach at Seattle Central College. We've also done work with their American Indian Studies department to support more classes being offered in American Indian Studies that transfer directly to UW. We are supporting work this summer about making transfer pathways more clear for Native students. We have a huge number of Native students that go to 2 year colleges and some that make the transfer leap, but not nearly enough.

This program is just amazing. We've done a one week orientation for several years, then we meet weekly throughout the rest of the year. It's really an informal social space more than anything else, but it does the work of connecting these students to Native campus life: to the American Indian Studies department, to the Intellectual House, to other CAIIS programming, it's really a way of bringing folks in and building community.

I'm excited about this next year, because, American Indian Studies faculty, with the support of CAIIS and also the College Edge program, which is in the College of Arts and Sciences, we're gonna be expanding the one week orientation program to a full month summer class. This is gonna be great because not only will these students get to come together for a more extended period of time, they get to know Native communities in the area.

They'll be working directly with three Native faculty from American Indian Studies to do this work. Also, through the College Edge program, they'll have dedicated housing that they can move into starting in mid August and stay in throughout the entire year. Because they're all coming in as a cohort, assuming we have enough students and it all works, we will actually have a Native floor of a dorm. It's really different than anything we've been able to do before. I'm super excited about this program and the community that's being built out of it.

This week, we did one of our signature events. We went to Suquamish Nation on Sunday and met Barbara Lawrence and her sons. We did a tour of the Suquamish Museum, then we heard stories from Barbara Lawrence about the powerful work her and her son, Nigel-- who has served on the Tribal council and is the head skipper for their youth canoe-- about the Suquamish Tribe and all of the really powerful work that they're doing around things like housing and supporting the elders. We got to see firsthand the powerful work that is happening in the Suquamish Nation.  The students also got to go out in Nigel's canoe yesterday, which was a really cool experience.

Summer Institute in the Indigenous Humanities

Dennison: We have a couple of other programs that are offered specifically over the summer. One is the Summer Institute For Indigenous Humanities. It's going to be led by Jessica Bissett Perea, who is a new faculty member in American Indian Studies, as well as Polly Olsen, who works at the Burke Museum. The two of them are going to be leading a two week weaving workshop where they're going to be bringing in different Native weavers to teach the students that are accepted into the program Native weaving, and to think about what this teaches us about Indigenous research methodologies. This is a program that's designed to spur interest in undergraduate students in Indigenous research and Indigenous humanities research specifically, but to not do it in the kind of extractive way that research is often talked about and done. Instead, to really think about what it means to do this in community engaged and collaborative ways and to do it based in practice. It includes a stipend for the students that are involved, and it's a really fun program. 

Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities

Dennison: This is actually a partnership that happens between the University of Washington, University of British Columbia, and some other institutions across the United States that brings together different Native graduate students and thinks about Indigenous methodologies and how they impact graduate school.

What work is being done at UW Tacoma?

Dennison: A lot of our programming in the pathways program, I'm excited about because it's going to be a partnership this next summer grounded on the Tacoma campus a little bit more directly. This is because our NUW scholars program and some of our other programs are more based on the Seattle campus than across all three campuses. We're doing that uneven work of developing things across all three campuses. 

We've been getting a good amount of work going at the University of Washington at Tacoma, including the Native Family Lunch, which is a program that we do—we did on the Seattle campus as well—where just once a month, we invite Native faculty, staff, and students to all come together and eat lunch together. They also have a graduate teaching fellowship on the Tacoma campus. They're working really directly on this pathways program and Native knowledge lecture grants, so we have various programs that we're operating on the Tacoma campus. 

Native Organization of Indigenous Scholars

Dennison: This is kind of like the equivalent of First Nations—but for graduate students— to come together and support each other, and to think about what it is they need to create community. Because almost all the grad students are the only or one of just a couple Native grad students in their entire program, this can be really alienating, especially because so often we run into the same kinds of problems with being the only person in your cohort who is interested in doing this kind of research, or people expect you to connect them with their Native resources rather than you being the one supported.

This is a really great space where graduate students can come together and share strategies. Anytime we host speakers on campus or do other kinds of things that are of interest to this group, we'll have a special coffee hour that's just with NOIS graduate students.

American Indian and Indigenous Scholars (AIIS)

Dennison: AIIS Scholars is a workshop for faculty and graduate students to come together and share a research project that they're working on; To really think about Indigenous methodologies and Indigenous theory, to create a space where we get to think about that across campus for these events.

In fact, most people find in research that it's much more about the individual and individual brilliance, so this is more of an innovative model in the humanities than it would be in the sciences. It's also doing it in a way that centers Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous community experts to think about, what are the kinds of research questions that need to be asked and how it is that we do research, and even what research looks like?

Outside the Burke Museum, there's these beautiful camas baskets that are woven. This is in the Burke meadow to keep the rabbits from eating all of the camas. They had originally thought okay, let's weave something as a fence, and then decided that's not the right metaphor. What we really want to do is a basket metaphor of protecting these resources. It's a really cool program of stuff that they've done, it's really about connecting undergraduate students with Native knowledge mentors. Again, changing and shifting what research methods can look like here on campus. 

Qacagʷac Awards

Dennison: This is a flexible award that can be used by Native faculty, staff, or students to help them thrive in their career. Faculty have used this to support publications of books, graduate students have used this to support doing their research so that they can complete their dissertations, undergraduates have used this to be able to go to conferences and to present stuff.

It can be used in a broad host of ways. The main difference between the Qacagʷac awards and Native knowledge is that for Qacagʷac, it's really sort of about your individual and your career. You have to sort of talk about why this is important for you, versus Native Knowledge which is much more about, how this is important for the community as a whole.

It's basically just anybody that has a strong background in Native studies so that they're not in a section with people that are legitimately like, I really didn't know that Native Peoples existed. The vast majority of the folks enrolling in American Indian Studies classes might not be quite at that level, but are at a really intro level, and they need really intro content and conversations to process all of that. 

For Native students or folks, that doesn't help you in life to hear that from people. It's been really powerful to create a separate discussion section, where we're having much more advanced conversations. In fact, most of the conversations are more like, how has colonialism directly impacted my life? What is my community doing to challenge these forces? What is my community doing to embrace our cultural traditions? We're able to have really powerful conversations in those sections.

That has been really fun, and so the piece of this that is really cool in terms of how these two things work together is that then I have Native students who have already built community together, coming together in their very first quarter. They already have community, and they come together in a class and continue that community in a way that, not only they're caring for each other, but really me. This is actually faculty retention work, because that kind of community is what keeps me here wanting to do this work. It's what makes it possible for me to do this work, because it becomes a space of care not only for them, but also for myself. 

Dennison: The Intellectual House, of course, there's important work that they're doing. I was just talking with her [Chenoa Henry] on Friday, and there's some really cool projects that she has in the works that are gonna be mentor programs for Native students, connecting them with Native community members--specifically alumni--to do mentorship programs.

She's also gonna be doing an end of the year thing for a lot of the Native RSOs about what it means to take leadership in an RSO and to support some of the transition work that happens at the end of each year, so that there isn't such a gap in a lot of the RSOs in the next year as new people take on leadership roles. With Phase Two, there's a lot of exciting ideas and potential of what all that space can be. 

From wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ: wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House is a longhouse-style facility on the UW Seattle campus. It provides a multi-service learning and gathering space for American Indian and Alaska Native students, faculty and staff, as well as others from various cultures and communities to come together in a welcoming environment to share knowledge. When it opened its doors for the first time in 2015, the Intellectual House made history. The building was the culmination of a decades-long dream to create a gathering place in honor of our region’s First Nations. An iconic structure on the University of Washington campus, the Intellectual House has been home to many tribal summits and events, and it has been the site of many other university and community events. Now, it is time to complete Phase 2 by adding spaces specifically for students. Phase 2 will require a collaboration among tribes, businesses, individuals and the University.

Indigenous Wellness Research Institute

Michelle Johnson-Jennings & Tessa Evans-Campbell

Co-Directors, Indigenous Wellness Research Institute

Dennison: The Indigenous Wellness Research Institute is in the School of Social Work, and they certainly do a lot of research and get folks involved in really powerful community based research around wellness.

From the IWRI: Our mission is to support the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples to achieve full and complete health and wellness by collaborating in decolonizing research and knowledge building and sharing.