Inside the Peabody Museum on a windy October day, leaders of the Sac and Fox Nation peered into the eyes of their ancestor, William Jones, the second Indigenous person to graduate from Harvard, in 1901. Posed in a cap and gown, Jones’s black-and-white photographs sit under a glass case beside a pair of beaded moccasins.
“He’s almost as good-looking as I am,” Principal Chief Randle Carter joked with Robert Williamson. Carter and Williamson had traveled to Harvard from Oklahoma, where Jones was born in 1871 and the tribe is based today.
The Sac and Fox are one of 574 Native tribes who operate as nations within a nation; they have the right to self-governance and maintain their own political systems. Williamson and Carter were invited to Harvard by Eric Henson, a lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a longstanding member of the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development, which helps Indigenous nations worldwide strengthen their governance systems. Henson’s Fall 2024 GSD course, “Native Nations and Contemporary Land Use”, brought together GSD students with representatives of the Sac and Fox—along with the tribe’s collaborator, a professional hockey team—to help the tribes meet their goals to regain sovereignty over their ancestral lands in Illinois.
“With a focus on land use, landback initiatives, and economic development opportunities,” writes Henson, “the course provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to how Native people are addressing these issues today.” Landback initiatives have been underway since the colonial era but only became widely known as such in the last few years. Part of Native nations’ work towards claiming their sovereignty, landback focuses on a number of initiatives, including acquiring land that was stolen from them throughout the process of colonization.
“If you’re building something new, or designing a park,” said Henson, explaining the importance of learning Indigenous history at a design school, “you have these steps you are supposed to check off: Did we do this review? Did we look for artifacts or archaeological dig sites? I’d like to see a degree of understanding beyond that. It’s not just a box to check off. You’re talking about real people who are victims of genocide and war and outright theft of their traditional territory. Taking a few minutes talking to a tribal leader before starting a design might open your eyes to the place in which you’re doing that work.”
For example, he says, in Bendigo, a town north of Melbourne, Australia, town leaders collaborated with the Dja Dja Wurrung, the Indigenous community, to incorporate Native design elements, revitalizing the town and attracting more investors. Henson noted that there are Native design elements in many buildings in Bendigo, which offers a model for others to follow.
This semester, students are working with two Indigenous Nations. Henson, a Chickasaw citizen, draws from his deep contacts with tribes around the US who have requested to work with him and his classes. The course Henson teaches at the Kennedy School, Nation Building II/Native Americans in the Twenty-First Century, offers collaborations with Indigenous Nations and now serves as a companion to the course at the GSD, with projects carrying over from one to the other. The course at the Kennedy School is cross-listed with the GSD, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Graduate School of Education, and the Chan School of Public Health.
“With more education around Indigenous history, culture, and design, there could be tremendous collaboration between designers and Indigenous nations,” Henson argued, “with Indigenous design elements incorporated. In addition, non-Native communities that neighbor tribal lands have great opportunities, if they want to embrace them and work with tribes.” Not least of which, Henson explained, is the tribes’ access to federal funding and their role as major employers, particularly in rural areas.
This mutually beneficial relationship is what Rahul Mehrotra hoped for when he suggested a Native-focused GSD course to Henson in 2020, when Mehrotra was chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. Henson collaborated with Philip DeLoria and Daniel D’Oca to design an interdisciplinary GSD class they called “Land Loss, Reclamation, and Stewardship.”
“In the context of discussions at the GSD on diverse ways of understanding history, and in the context of climate change,” said Mehrotra, “learning from traditional practices is very important. The relationship that Native Americans have to the land, and to nature more broadly, is sensitive, beautiful, poetic, and empathetic—and incredibly intelligent.”
GSD students’ work impacts the lived environment around the world, Mehrotra explained, and with more education about Indigenous people and their history, design students’ sensibilities would invariably shift.
“I wanted the Indigenous studies course to have history, design, and practice components,” said Mehrotra, “so that students would have a sense of what they can learn from history and traditional practices as they intersect with design.”
This past fall in Henson’s course, GSD students Cayden Abu-Arja (MArch I / MUP ’27) and Neady Oduor (MDes ’26) opted to work with Carter and Williamson to design a program to help them regain their ancestral lands, which the tribe determined was one of their primary goals.
“Our traditional lands,” Williamson explained, “are not in Oklahoma.”
For 12,000 years, the two tribes, then known as Sauk (now Sac), the Yellow Earth People, and Meswaki (Fox), the Red Earth People inhabited the area around Quebec, Montreal, and eastern New York state, but were forced southwest by the Iroquois, and then further west by the French. The two tribes banded together and moved to Illinois, establishing their summer village in Saukenuk, today known as Rock Island, along the Mississippi River. There, they planted 800 acres of corn, vegetables, and fruit to feed the almost 5,000 people in the well-organized community.
Abu-Arja and Oduor quoted tribal leader Black Hawk’s autobiography, in which he describes his memories of that place: “It was our garden (like the white people have near their big villages) which supplied us with strawberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds, and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river.” Black Hawk recalled spending his childhood summers on the island, surounded by family.
In 1804, colonists tricked the Sac and Fox chief into signing a treaty that gave the land to Illinois, forcing the tribe off their summer grounds to the west of the Mississippi. By 1832, with the Sac and Fox people starving, Black Hawk led the community back to Saukenuk to plant their traditional summer crops.
“After years of encroachments from the US government,” said Williamson, “this was Black Hawk saying, ‘I want to go home.’” Instead, said Williamson, the Illinois militia “slaughtered women, children, and older men” over the course of more than three months, in what colonists called the Black Hawk War. The Sac and Fox were subsequently pushed further west again, this time to Oklahoma, where they live today and continue to fight for access to their ancestral lands.
Landback Initiatives & Innovative Collaborations
At the beginning of January, another tribe, the Prairie Band Potawatomi, were approved by the Illinois State House to receive a land transfer of 1,400 acres, which makes up Shabbona Lake State Park, named for Chief Shab-eh-nay. The government sold the land illegally in 1849, violating a treaty the Prairie Band had signed 20 years earlier. The Potawatomi have agreed to continue allowing public access to the park, which will be maintained by the state.
Tribes across the US have undertaken landback initiatives in different ways, from acquiring the land through private purchase to lobbying for it from state lands or through estate planning. For the Sac and Fox, a Nation with about 4,000 members, the goal is to follow the lead of the Potawatomi to reestablish their footing back in Illinois around the site of Saukenuk village. Today, Illinois maintains Black Hawk Historic Site on the tribe’s ancestral lands, with a statue of the warrior, a small museum that describes Saukenuk, and a 100-acre nature preserve. Williamson noted that, like many other Indigenous US tribes, their leaders’ names have been used for streets, towns, professional sports teams, and even army helicopters. They deserve to have access to their ancestral lands.
Joining Carter and Williamson on their trip to Illinois were representatives from the Blackhawks Hockey team, whose CEO, Danny Wirtz, has invited the nation to collaborate in ways the Sac and Fox choose. While many Indigenous advocates have argued for professional sports teams to change their name, Wirtz suggests that the collaborative work he and his team are doing with the Sac and Fox requires more authentically engaging with one another. The tribe voted to work with the hockey team and is prioritizing economic development, strategic planning (including landback initiatives), and language preservation projects.
“Our partnership with Black Hawks’ tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma,” says Sara Guderyahn, the Chicago Blackhawk’s Executive Director, “is centered around education and cultural preservation with the goal of supporting the Nation’s priorities for sovereignty. To that end, we are excited and optimistic that this project is an important step to explore opportunities for the Nation to reconnect with their original homelands in Illinois.”
GSD students Abu-Arja and Oduor began their work with the Sac and Fox by learning about the tribe’s history, including their forced migration through the US, Black Hawk’s leadership, and the Nation’s ancestral lands. The group’s visit to the Peabody Museum with Carter and Williamson highlighted the Sac and Fox’s most famous members: anthropologist William Jones, whose photos and writings they viewed alongside the leaders at the museum and in the archives, and football player Jim Thorpe, who won two Olympic gold medals in 1912.
“When you look at the record books,” said Chief Carter, “Thorpe was not a citizen of the US. Before 1924, Indian people were not citizens of the United States. The record should say he was a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation.”
Henson led the group to visit a site on Harvard’s campus that brings Thorpe’s legacy back to contemporary material culture. At what’s now Clover Food Lab, the ceiling tiles that depict the early twentieth-century Harvard football league pennant flags include the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. When Jim Thorpe led Carlisle to defeat Harvard in 1911, the Indian School was cut from the league; Harvard never played them again. The Indian Industrial school was part of the US government’s attempt to erase Indigenous culture through the forced removal of thousands of children from their homes and families, under the motto “kill the Indian, save the Man.” When the tiles were uncovered on Massachusetts Avenue, right across from Harvard’s gates, in a 2016 renovation, they restored to the record in Cambridge the story of Jim Thorpe at Carlisle, before he went on to win Olympic gold medals.
The group’s visit to the site was part of a tour Henson led, which was originally designed by Jordan Clark, Executive Director of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) and a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah. The tour makes visible the Indigenous histories that are often missed all around us.
For example, Henson pointed out a plaque on the side of Matthews Hall, commemorating the history of Harvard’s Indian College— founded by missionaries in the 1640s—whose bricks were eventually dismantled to build other Harvard structures. Henson pointed to a spot on the lawn beside Matthews Hall, where a 1990s archeological dig revealed pieces of the press used to print the Eliot Bible, written in Algonquin (a language of Indigenous tribes), the first Bible printed in the US, now held at the Houghton Library. Henson noted the plaque on the president’s house that names the enslaved people who laboured there, and the rusty pump in the center of the yard, which marks the water source from which Massachusett and other Indigenous people were cut off when settlers claimed the site.
Making Indigenous histories visible, highlighting how their stories predate colonization by thousands of years, as well as how they are irrevocably intertwined with Harvard’s history, helps to make tangible the ethos of the land acknowledgment that the GSD wrote in collaboration with HUNAP and reads at the beginning of every public event.
Strategies to Educate the Public and Regain Access to Saukenuk
After learning the histories of Indigenous nations in the east and midwest, Abu-Arja and Oduor focused on designing a program centered on “co-management” of the Black Hawk State Historic Site, which they say the Sac and Fox Nation “sees…as a way to connect with their ancestral homeland…and pass on traditions (some of which were lost when they were removed from their land).” The team outlined three goals: 1) creating storytelling opportunities so that people understand the “social and cultural significance of the Black Hawk State Historic Site” to the Sac and Fox Nation, 2) developing revenue streams, and 3) increasing collaboration with Illinois state.
They defined 15 different activities, from collaborating with the Sac and Fox to develop new exhibits at the existing historic site museum, to building clan houses for cultural activities, hosting riverside storytelling sessions and ceremonies, creating a gift shop, and “tailoring [the tribe’s existing language programs] to young students who visit the site.” They note that the Nation can turn to existing protections, for example, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which would support co-managing the cemetery where Black Hawk’s children are buried but remain unnamed on signage that commemorates settlers. As precedent for managing burial grounds, they cite Minnesota’s Indian Mounds Regional Park, which was developed around the gravesites of several tribal nations to protect the mounds and share their people’s histories. By increasing the public’s knowledge of and engagement with the Sac and Fox Nation, as well as collaborating with the state government, the Sac and Fox’s case for landback will become more visible—and therefore, more viable.
At the end of the semester, Abu-Arja and Oduor presented their proposals to the Sac and Fox Nation, who are moving ahead with their plans to develop the programs in Illinois, which they hope will bring them one step closer in their two-hundred-year battle, starting with their ancestor Black Hawk, to regain their lands.