Local Context

MSU's official land acknowledgement

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. In particular, the university resides on land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. We recognize Michigan’s 12 federally recognized Native Nations, historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and those who were forcibly removed from their homelands. In offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty, history and experiences.

Noteworthy realities of land cessation:

• The Indigenous nations were invited to negotiate land cessation in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw under false pretences. 

• Indigenous peoples had few resources with which to resist land cessation in the Treating, being exhausted by the war of 1812 and abandoned by British for whom they'd fought.

• The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, eliminated Indigenous land claims (the greatest obstacle to U.S. expansionism). In the treaty, Great Britain accepted the borders of the U.S. and withdrew support for an Indian border state lying between Canada and the United States covering the area now known as Michigan.

• In 1862, further exporpriation of Indigenous land to US HE institutions like MSU occurred under the Morrill Act (created the Land-Grant Univrsity System).

• Notably, the Morrill act demonstrated a fundamental alignment between Land-Grant institutions and the federal government as it depended on the addition of military strategy to the fields of study.

Writing Centre internationalization exists within the same colonial project.

US Higher Education does not stop being colonial when it moves from domestic to international territories. Significant patterns of global proliferation of writing centres over the last three decades have involved transregional (across formal and informal regional borders of all sorts, from national to cultural and economic) collaborations between the U.S. Department of State (DOS), U.S.-based scholars and institutions, and scholars and institutions across Africa; the Middle East; Central, East, and Southeast Asia; and Latin America, often called the Global South, as well as Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. 

US-authored literature documenting transregional writing centre initiatives (TWCI) typically articulates social justice aims involving increasing access for international students and scholars to an imagined ‘standard’ American English, and, therefore, to highly ranked, U.S. academic publications and higher education (HE) institutions. 

In this literature, considerations for inclusion and access are not typically extended to considerations of the global political systems that maintain the dominance of U.S. and Western languages, epistemologies, and institutions across HE and academia more broadly (see Hotson & Bell, 2024; Donahue, 2009; Zenger, 2016).

In this way, this literature does not tend toward decolonial goals; decolonial effort involves pushing beyond questions of access to and inclusion within centres of power to questions about the nature of the colonial systems that dictate the lines of inclusion and exclusion. 

As Tuck and Yang (2012) assert, decolonization “is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects” that “wants something different than those forms of justice” (p. 2). 

On Readiness for Discomfort

Engaging in any sort of critical self reflection requires intentionality around cognitive biases. Unconsciously, all reasoning is motivated towards favourable conclusions, ideas, and beliefs which causes us to avoid, discard, or downplay counter-evidence.

Preparing for critical reflection requires intentionality about the cognitive biases shaping our reasoning. 

Ask yourself, how is my reasoning potentially shaped by my:

• • existing beliefs, politics, point-of-view, experiences;

  • intended goals;

  • commitment to doing good/being (perceived as) good;

  • avoidance of uncomfortable feelings like guilt and shame;

  • loyalty to friend groups, mentors, colleagues, accepted norms and ideas, and a desire to be accepted;

  • desire for profitability and other forms of personal gain (i.e., professional advancement);

  • avoidance of conflicts/tensions/dissonance in my beliefs and actions;

  • ...

"If you avoid recruiting evidence that you would prefer not to believe, your beliefs will be based on only a comforting slice of the available facts." (Eply & Gilovich, 2016, p. 136).