On stolen land,by stolen people: Engaging with legacies of land dispossession and enslavement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

As faculty, staff, and students at a flagship public university in the US South—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—we inhabit land, infrastructure, and institutions that are foundationally entangled in Native dispossession, enslavement, and other complex processes of disenfranchisement. This article traces the experimental work of the Landback Abolition Project in asking how, through a land-as-pedagogy approach, we might enact more ethical relations to land and life, even within an educational framework shaped by racial capitalism. At the heart of our work is the question: how do faculty, students, staff, and community of a 234-year-old colonial institution create the conditions for a structural shift in our relations toward land and education? We build on recent scholarship on landgrab universities and reparations and share our approach to this work at our university, and how place-based research requires and educates us on the intersections of Black and Indigenous geographies.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) was founded on stolen land in the 18th century and later profited both from the sale of distant Cherokee and Chickasaw lands and from the labor and sale of enslaved Afro-Indigenous peoples (Kelley and Wright, 2020); UNC continues to benefit from the structures of disparity formed in that era. Details of this story—the mechanisms of land transfers, the stories of the enslaved and their descendants, remain obscure to many of the students, faculty, and staff, with critical impacts both on their (and our) relationships to the university and expectations for various forms of reform, repair, and transformation. UNC's surrounding communities, which literally built the university, have few acknowledgements or remembrances from the university that would even gesture to the extent of its harms, much less suggest the urgency of its own accountability.

In 2022, taking up the charge that “decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang, 2012), and that “freedom is a place” (Gilmore 2017: 226), we began the Landback Abolition Project at UNC through existing courses and independent research. We use the university as a site to connect the simultaneous demands for the return of stolen lands back to Native peoples and for the abolition of all vestiges of slavery and colonization, including (but not limited to) anti-Blackness, labor theft, policing, incarceration, displacement, epistemic erasure, and systemic socioeconomic disadvantage.

Our objectives and aspirations emerge through work with people impacted by the university through lineage or proximity. Our current primary goal is to learn collectively about the colonial practices of slavery, genocide, and dispossession that enabled the founding of our university. We want to make UNC's processes, practices, relationships, and aspirations for higher education publicly accessible and legible. The latter is imperative because the epistemic traditions upon which UNC and many other universities across the U.S. are founded are positioned as the only epistemologies that have relevance or value in U.S. society. The vast knowledge traditions of Ameri- and Afro-Indigenous peoples, and of the various immigrated peoples from across the globe are rendered largely illegible and illegitimate in the current-day U.S. education systems. These erasures complicate the demands for access and power at the university, particularly by Indigenous and Black people who have seen many of their own institutions and epistemologies (including languages), destroyed. We began this article in summer 2024 after our institution brought in police to crush a Gaza solidarity encampment, and a state-wide decision to ban university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work in universities. As we publish it, these kinds of bans and suppressions have escalated nationally under the second Trump administration; rather than deter us, we find committing to this work of collective learning and reckoning a harbor and anchoring point both for us and for involved students.

Through our own learning processes, in archives, conversations, and in writing, we are changing our relationships to one another, to impacted communities, and to UNC and Chapel Hill as co-constituted places. We write from contingent positions, as people employed by a colonial institution that also perpetuates colonial forms of education. As such, we enter this conversation in deep humility, acknowledging the limitations of working within the institution, but also fully aware that we cannot abdicate our obligations because of our compromised positions. We see our responsibility to fight for a different kind of institution and education, to be present and in good relation with the land and people of this place—past, present, and future—to learn and work toward their visions of justice and repair. Our work begins from the question: how do faculty, students, staff, and community of a 234-year-old colonial institution create the conditions for a structural shift in our relations toward land, labor, and education?

In this article, we make the case for taking up place-based research and teaching at the intersection of Black and Indigenous Geographies as an essential political and pedagogical practice for geographers, educators, scholars, and students. Following Black and Native scholars like Nathan Hare (1970) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), respectively, we encourage knowledge building from the places and institutions in which we are physically, politically, and socially located. When we began this article, the project team included Sara Smith and Danielle Purifoy (faculty in Geography and Environment), Petal Samuel and Maya Berry (faculty in African and African Diaspora Studies), and James Bryan (doctoral student in Geography and Environment), but this year Kayla Roulhac, Mackie Jackson, Sophia Chimbanda, Kerry Bannen, Kalila Arreola, and Kalin Despain have been crucial members of the project. We are joined by many additional students, faculty, and staff (especially advised by archivist Sarah Carrier and Danielle Hiraldo and Marissa Carmi at the American Indian Center) and are in collaboration with student organizations and community members.

In what follows, we locate our university through decades of Native and Black critique and struggle for justice and repair before bridging literature on Indigenous principles of land-as-pedagogy and place-based education, Black Geographies practices connecting land and liberation, and an understanding of racial capitalism connecting place to global empire and racialization. Finally, we describe the work and lessons of the project thus far and end with a call for geographers and scholars of other disciplines to take up place-based work.

Locating the university

Current text on UNC's “History and Traditions,” website begins:

The University of North Carolina was the first public university in the nation. In 1789, William Richardson Davie wrote the act that established the University. In 1793, he and fellow trustees laid the cornerstone of the first building, Old East. Students arrived in 1795, and UNC became the only public university to award degrees in the 18th century (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, n.d.).

As White Earth Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien observes, cultivated historical narratives obscure Native survival through “firsting,” and “lasting”: settlers declare themselves “the first people who established cultures and institutions worthy of notice” in a place (O’Brien, 2010: xxii). This rhetorical trick is paired with the assumption that Native people are no longer there—“lasting.” This temporal trick is woven into the fabric of the UNC narratives, from the story of the “Old Well” to University Day traditions: “an occasion to remember the University's past and celebrate its future. The date, October 12, marks the laying of the cornerstone of Old East, the institution's first building and the oldest state university building in the nation.” Writing from her position as alumna and descendant of people enslaved by the university, kynita stringer-stanback notes, “Curiously absent” is the “displacement of Indigenous nations that occupied the land on which the school was built as well as any mention of coerced chattel labor” (stringer-stanback, 2019: 317).

Our university witnessed repeated demands from Black and Native students and community members to reconsider its relations to them: demands for desegregation, for Black and Native faculty, curriculum change, labor rights, and addressing the campus landscape's Native erasure and celebration of white racial terror through monuments and building names. In the meantime (Bruno, 2023) as we strive for full and generous enactment of reparations and landback as material practices from the university, we devote ourselves to building community-driven public-facing primary research and pedagogy on the university's relationship to the historical and contemporary processes of dispossession and enslavement. The goal of this work is to generate both the evidence to bolster claims for justice as they emerge and to change the relations between land, infrastructure, and those of us who teach and study here.

Though UNC has yet to adopt a formal land acknowledgment, we know this land was inhabited by Native peoples. This land is still claimed by the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Indian Nation, as well as other Native Nations in North Carolina today. The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe, the Waccamaw Souian Indian Tribe, the Sappony Tribe, The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the Meherrin Indian Nation, the Coharie Indian Tribe, the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, and the Tuscarora were also in relation to the lands and people here. In the late 1780s, the construction of UNC began on land that had been donated to the University from white settler-enslavers, including General Benjamin Smith, Major Charles Gerrard, and William Barbee, each of whom had received land grants for revolutionary war service. UNC then operated at a deficit for decades and officials relied on the sales of stolen lands and escheated properties (property that belonged to an owner who died without an heir or whose citizenship status prohibited them from owning it to sustain the University) (McGee, 2019). However, the Great Chickasaw Cession Treaty of 1818 marked a shift in practices (of land theft) as UNC would receive the support of federal acts and treaties. The treaty allowed the seizure of remaining Chickasaw lands in Tennessee, which, along with stolen Cherokee lands, ultimately granted the University some 200,000 acres of stolen land that it would turn for a profit. When the treaty was signed, UNC Trustee Archibald Murphey rejoiced, “This treaty is very important to a great Many Claimants under North Carolina, the University will be made rich by it” (Kelley and Wright, 2020).

Between 1790 and 1840, UNC received $4 million (in present-day value) through escheated properties: 25% of the University's revenue. Between 1818 and 1840, land sales comprised 35 percent of the annual budget (Kelley and Wright, 2020). Escheated properties were not limited to land; enslaved people were also deemed property. University Trustees and faculty sold people and their labor for cash to build the University. UNC officials hired attorneys in relentless pursuit of any such property that could be sued for, seized, “recovered,” and escheated. The attitudes of University officials are reflected through stories recounted by the likes of former UNC President Kemp Battle, who recalled the story of a free Black man who purchased legal right to ownership of his own daughter. His daughter had a son. When the father died “without a rightful heir,” his daughter and grandson then became UNC property. Upon obtaining ownership rights of the family, University Trustees ordered for them to be sold (McGee, 2019). Enslaved laborers constructed many of the buildings that still stand, including Old East, Old West, and Gerrard Hall (Kelley and Wright, 2020). Records of former University Trustees, Colonel William Polk and Judge Frederick Nash, reveal that enslaved laborers owned by these Trustees worked overtime on expanding Old East, having to work nights and even on “Holy days” (Newhall, 2018).

Until August 20, 2018, when it was pulled to the ground by activists, visitors to campus were greeted by a soldier with a gun facing North. This monument had been erected in 1913, and unveiled surrounded by wealthy landowners, white women in white dresses, who listened to a speech in which Julian Carr lauded not only the Civil War soldiers but also the violent white struggle against Reconstruction. The 2018 removal followed a long tradition of activism directed at the monument and other campus sites, from graffiti in the wake of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. to the work of student activist Emil Little to provide historical context to the monument through pouring a mixture of blood and paint onto it. On the next quad, the Saunders building—named in 1922 for KKK leader William L Saunders was renamed after student activists had placed pressure first in 1999 to 2000 and then repeatedly throughout the 2014–2015 academic year, when the Board of Trustees also mandated a 16-year waiting period for additional changes. Student activism forced the renaming and removal (Babatunde, 2015; Bledsoe, 2015; Cravey, 2022; Dimpfl and Smith, 2018; FLOCK, 2021; Fryar, 2019; Lamm, 2015; Menefee, 2018; Purifoy, 2019; Smith, 2020).

After the fall of the confederate monument, Kenan stadium was renamed for Kenan's son. The Kenan family had been instrumental in the white racial violence in 1898 Wilmington (Calcaterra, 2018). In 2019, the “Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward,” was formed to “explore, engage and teach the University's history with race, and provide recommendations to the Chancellor on how we as a University community must reckon with the past” (About the Commission: History and Race, n.d.). In 2020, the Board of Trustees voted to allow renaming of the more than 30 buildings with enslavers’ names, but this process has been slow (McLellan, 2018; Wamsley, 2020). Since then, students have consistently connected the work of renaming to the need for more than metaphorical work.

At the 2022 dedication of the Henry Owl Building, two members of Carolina Indian Circle, both, like Owl, enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, countered the celebratory atmosphere of the dedication. Colby Taylor spoke on his definition of courage as “the choice and willingness to be uncomfortable,” going on to say that renaming the building should be the first step, and that true commitment to Owl's legacy—as someone who had studied and fought for Native voting rights during his time at UNC—would be to support Native students and students of color. Following Taylor's comments, Juanita Paz-Chalacha challenged UNC:

I’m here before you all today not with a multitude of praise for this event, but with a hollow and exhausted anger. Yes, this event is a significant step forward in getting Native representation on campus. Yet, it is still one long-overdue step. The representation we get here has to come from the Native students themselves, not the university. While we are seen here at this event for the duration of time we are here, afterward, what are you, the university administration, going to do to get proper representation to your Native students and faculty going forward? (Lossiah, 2022).

Black and Native community members have expressed the urgency of reparative work in petitions and letters, statements and protests. Danita Mason-Hogans has made repeated public calls for reparations from the university, connecting the history of slavery to ongoing labor exploitation and to the structure of the local K-12 schools—which have one of the largest racialized opportunity gaps in the United States (Fanning, 2024). This demand comes from Mason-Hogans's work as a public historian (https://www.danitamasonhogans.com), but also from her family's connections: her ancestors were enslaved by prominent UNC families, her grandfather worked for the Inn connected to the university, and her mother worked as one of the first Black UNC admissions officers. In a 2020 interview, she unravels her family's deep connections: “We just recently discovered that some of our [enslaved] ancestors were buried on the grounds of UNC's Finley Golf Course.” Mason-Hogans calls for material reparations (Krueger, 2020), proposing: “that UNC Chapel Hill pay for a Pre-K through 12th grade after-school enrichment program and tuition to any UNC System school for the descendants of enslaved workers. She is also calling for reimbursement of past tuition paid by eligible alumni…I think it's important that UNC pick up the tab number one, because ancestors of mine and of local people contributed to the $6.8 billion endowment that UNC enjoys right now.” kynita stringer-stanback also connects her educational experience to UNC's connections to slavery, in an insightful and necessary article, “from slavery to college loans” (stringer-stanback, 2019). stringer-stanback is descended from Wilson and November Caldwell, an enslaved father and son who were instrumental in UNC's history.

The former Saunders building, now Carolina Hall, borders the quadrangle named for US President James Polk, a North Carolina born UNC alum and settler-enslaver who benefited from the Indian Removal Act of 1930 by buying a new cotton plantation in Yalobusha County, Mississippi, and then later secured the presidential nomination by running on a Manifest Destiny campaign. Some of us also participated in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on this same lawn. We witnessed Native students in solidarity with Palestinian struggle, and we saw the university chancellor deploying police to remove protestors from the Polk quad flagpole so that he could personally help hoist the US flag to replace the Palestinian one raised by activists. In such moments, the intimacies of empire are unavoidable, as the commemorative landscape, the actions of administrators, and the work of the students, all present a microcosm of empire made local. We also witness, in student action, forms of solidarity that resonate in their resistance to interwoven global empire—from work to divest from apartheid South Africa to protesting for Palestinian futures to student support for housekeepers. It is beyond the scope of this article to fully describe the ways that our institution is complex and fraught with contradictions—as all institutions are made of many pieces, and of people who bring their own agency and intentions to this place—thus there are also in this place both Native and Black-student serving individuals and spaces caught up in the larger assemblage, as well as an undercommons of flight and fugitivity (Harney and Moten, 2013; paperson, 2018).

Black and Native student positions are distinct due to divergent histories and distinct claims on the state based on racialized and national identity—that is, Native nations maintain a distinct political status that is different than other racialized people (Byrd, 2011), some Native nations, such as the Cherokee, also participated in slavery (64–65; Miles and Holland, 2006) (and there are also differences in both strategies and positioning between federally recognized tribes (such as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) and state recognized tribes such as the Lumbee (Hiraldo, 2020). The removal of Africans from their Indigenous lands, and severance from their languages and ancestral ties through slavery and its continuities pose overlapping, but distinct challenges from Ameri-Indigenous peoples, particularly in terms of citizenship and identity. At the same time, Black and Native lives and experiences at the university and beyond are not mutually exclusive—our engagement in this project necessitates an understanding of the deeply entangled histories and presents of Black and Native peoples, particularly in the U.S. South (Coleman, 2013).

Landback, land grab universities and universities as sites for repair

The charters of the earliest US colleges—Harvard, Dartmouth, William, and Mary—reveal how the establishment of US universities is tied to Native assimilation and land theft, and universities both profited from and defended the slave trade (Ambo and Rocha Beardall, 2023; see also Carney, 2017; Grande, 2015; Wilder, 2013). A wave of scholarship challenges us to grapple with the limitations of how universities have grappled with this history (Ambo and Rocha Beardall, 2023; Bruno et al., 2023; Cobb and Carmi, 2023; Curley and Smith, 2020; Daigle, 2019; Lambert et al., 2021; McCoy et al., 2021; Red Shirt-Shaw, 2020; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Ambo and Rocha Beardall (2023) describe most university land acknowledgements as “rhetorical removal”; such statements name local Indigenous Peoples without clearly defining the responsibilities that universities hold toward these peoples. Instead, land acknowledgments soften historical violence and maintain the illusion that Native people belong in the past. This assessment is echoed in the 2022 UNC First Nations Graduate Circle (FNGC) letter to administration:

A true acknowledgment of the land, sovereignty, presence, and survivance of Native Nations must be paired with tangible commitments to prove the University's sincerity. Without an action plan, UNC's land acknowledgment will be a hollow gesture that exclusively benefits the administration, rather than the campus community the administration is appointed to serve.

More than a decade ago, Tuck and Yang observed that casual use of the term “decolonization” can devolve into “settler moves to innocence,” against which they propose, “decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically” (Tuck and Yang 2012: 7).

In their groundbreaking “Land-Grab Universities” report, Lee and Ahtone (2020) detail how land theft funded universities. Under the 1862 Morrill Act, almost 11 million acres of land were distributed to institutions of higher education, and the funds raised were to “be used in perpetuity.” Thus, “land-grant universities not only exist upon Indigenous lands but also have been built with Indigenous lands” (McCoy et al., 2021: 169; citing Stein, 2020). Universities are then inseparable from the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Pacific Railroads Act of 1862; and also benefited “lawyers, surveyors, real estate developers, bankers, miners, and timber and construction barons” (Ambo and Rocha Beardall, 2023: 109; and Blackhawk et al., 2014; citing Rocha Beardall, 2022). UNC, as detailed below, is not a Morrill institution, but it is no exception—it drew its wealth in the 19^th century from the theft of Native land across the state and into Tennessee, and its history is tied to the expansion of industrialist and agricultural networks of power in the state, with buildings bearing the names of these families, such as Kenan, Patterson, Caldwell, and many others. Today, we can still find on campus what Amanda Tachine has referred to as “systemic monsters and hauntings,” the “shapeshifting, morphing,” forms of white supremacy and settler colonialism that “disrupt sovereignty and belonging” (Tachine, 2022: 7).

Red Shirt-Shaw argues for land return or free education for Native students as a means of repair, but also argues for a shift “to decolonial ways of knowing, which includes land based ways of knowing” (McCoy et al., 2016; citing Mihesuah, 2000; Red Shirt-Shaw, 2020). This land education acknowledges land as more than property—that for Native students this is “land that was and is culturally, spiritually, and emotionally theirs. Their oral traditions, medicines, and ways of knowing are connected to place” (Red Shirt-Shaw, 2020: 3). Land education begins from Indigenous inhabitants, and is “accountable to Indigenous futurities” (McCoy et al., 2016: 8). Land is thus “a living relation and teacher,” and demands ethical responsibility (Dorries and Daigle, 2024: 2; citing Goeman, 2015). Landback has gained attention over the last five years as a hashtag and set of demands, and an articulated position in the 2020 NDN Collective LANDBACK campaign anchored in the Black Hills (Dorries and Daigle, 2024; Glendenning et al., 2023). But it is also a continuation of the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty in the Americas since 1492, and building on actions scattered across the 20^th century from the occupation of Alcatraz to the return of Taos Pueblo lands in 1970s, and a Bison range to Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in 2020 (Coulthard, 2019; Dorries and Daigle, 2024; Glendenning et al., 2023; Manuel and Posluns, 2019).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes that “abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place.” Black people's practice of abolition is “to destroy the geography of slavery by mixing their labor with the external world to change the world and thereby themselves” (Gilmore, 2017: 226, 231). Systematic alienation from Afro-indigenous lands, practices, and epistemic traditions, along with the forced, extractive relationship to the lands of the “New World,” including the formation of modern property and the “human,” form the context in which Black people enter the university (McKittrick, 2014; Park, 2021; Wilder, 2013). Black people have contended with centuries of Western epistemic traditions denying the viability of Black education, developing anti-Black curricula, and the diminishment and weaponization of their hard-earned credentials to undermine Black livelihoods within the long afterlife of African colonization and slavery (Anderson, 2002; Cottom, 2017; Love, 2019).

The unending challenge of making free lives in the context of centuries of embedded colonial bondage of land, people, and the very building blocks of life makes critical several imperatives. Recovering knowledges, rebuilding epistemologies rooted in the land relations and practices upon which African extraction to the West were predicated, and working alongside Native peoples of these stolen lands to manifest a vision of abolition geography that makes possible life for all who have landed here, human or otherwise. In the university context, abolition also requires attention to the literal and material role of policing on campus (Boggs et al., 2023; Maldonado and Meiners, 2021; Singh and Vora, 2023)—something that has been broached by multiple student groups at the university, in our community engagement, and is one of the first topics that a student—Shuhud Mustafa—proposed to us as an independent research project. Abolition simultaneously requires reckoning with the possibilities and impossibilities of repair between people and land.

Landscapes and institutions are also archives, which on our campus both evokes and erases history. Institutional archival holdings and normative archival research practices both serve to obscure how European civilization required the subjugation of others to “geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree,” and writing a history in which liberal promises of freedom, progress and equality were cordoned off from the “global conditions on which they depended (Lowe, 2015: 2; citing Byrd, 2011; Gilroy, 1993; Robinson, 1983). The university landscape celebrates its position as a historic first public university. Yet through omission, naming practices, and building esthetics, the undersides of these histories are subdued. To better understand how both chattel slavery and Indigenous dispossession are foundational to US modernity as defined and enacted by US universities (Byrd, 2019), we turn to global inflected theories of racial capitalism and adapted land-as-pedagogy approaches, which also help us learn the how of landback and abolition.

In Development Arrested, Clyde Woods (1998) begins from the Mississippi Delta as a distinct place, and, using both a Marxist-inflected analysis and a Blues epistemology drawing on Black thought and expression, traces how political and economic relations and white supremacy are grounded in and expressed through land. His Blues epistemology works against these persistent forms of white settler violence by demonstrating through their daily community praxes, public organizing, legal challenges, and through the cultural reproduction of the Blues, other forms of placemaking and social relations that exceed the strictures of the plantation. Black geographies methods profoundly complement land-as-pedagogy (Goeman, 2015; McCoy et al., 2016; Simpson, 2017) grounded in Native and Critical Indigenous Studies. These are politically-oriented practices that seek to ground knowledge in the land itself and in the relationships of kin, of violence, and of politics that are tied to how this land is understood, as well as how it is managed or allocated by the state or by social systems that predate the state. As Celeste Winston articulates with regard to maroon geographies—sites of Black freedom making in during and in the wake of slavery—Black placemaking traditions are partially “shaped by rejections of dominant spatial imaginaries in addition to life affirming forms of community” (2), including creating “fugitive infrastructure[s]” that encompass caretaking, resource and information sharing, and use of the physical landscapes as a means of “holding ground—a geographic practice of making and sustaining place, and a refusal to yield or compromise in the face of attack or affront” (3).

Indigenous theories of relationality also disrupt settler political and property relations and take into account how people's relations to the land have been shaped by dispossession (Daigle, forthcoming; Goeman, 2015; Palmer, 2020; Tuck et al., 2013). In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Simpson narrates both how her children are growing up in relation to their homelands, speaks of learning land relations through an elder, and on a realization of loss in what Nishnaabeg land had been.

I began to start my own talks with a narrative of what our land used to look like as a quick glimpse, albeit a generalized one, of what was lost—not as a mourning of loss but as a way of living in an Nishnaabeg present that collapses both the past and the future and as a way of positioning myself in relation to my Ancestors and my relations (Simpson, 2017: 2).

Simpson demonstrates land-as-pedagogy through a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg (Mississauga Ojibwe) story of a child, Kwezens, who learns from a squirrel how to tap maple trees for sugar, and then, with relatives creates the process of making maple syrup. Through Kwenzens's movement through land and community relations, and her own sons’ relation to their territory, Simpson demonstrates the potential of sovereignty and freedom learned from relation to the land itself as well as the ways that Indigenous political theory is grounded in the land (Simpson, 2017; see also Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). In Rehearsals for Living, Maynard and Simpson (2022) exchange letters grounded in Black and Indigenous women's experiences of life in a settler state. Maynard opens with a letter to Simpson, a different kind of land as pedagogy that resonates with our work: she walks across the city of Toronto narrating the journey past the James Bay Resources Limited headquarters that direct extraction in the Niger Delta, past other companies engaged in similar extraction in other sites on the continent, and ends at the headquarters of Copper One, which is then engaged in a legal battle against Algonquins of Barrière Lake.

Complementing land-as-pedagogy, theories of global empire and racial capitalism demonstrate the centrality of racialization to smoothing the path of capitalism across this land and how settler-enslaver twinned processes of dispossession and enslavement are not a historical misstep but foundational to the legal systems and fiction of the liberal subject that enables our educational system and infrastructure; that these histories are made to seem separable is a consequence of forgetting and erasure that we have to fight (Lowe, 2015; Robinson, 1983).

The afterlife of slavery persists in “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment,” (Hartman, 2008a: 6; Gilmore, 2002; McKittrick, 2013; Sharpe, 2016; Purifoy, 2021b), alongside Black geographies of livingness and futurity (Bruno, 2024; Purifoy, 2021a; Quashie, 2021). At the site of the university, “plantation politics” persist—new iterations of old logics meant to “control, exploit, and marginalize Black people” (Williams et al., 2021: 3). Williams et al. ask us “what one might see, understand, and imagine they might do, if we recognize the haunting of plantation life as existing not only in the walls and structures that buttress the university but also in its operations, hiring practices, recruitment and attainment strategies, curriculum, and notions of sociality safety, and community” (Williams et al., 2021: 3). We witness plantation politics in the stubbornness and anxiety over the racialized landscapes of the university campus, in and far beyond the U.S. South (Inwood and Alderman, 2016; Lowery, 2018; Pulido, 2023). The centrality of university roles in promulgating and profiting from racial capitalism also continue in gentrification and the ways that they spill out into the towns and cities in which they are sited (Baldwin, 2021; Serrano, 2023).

In our work, we weave together Woods's Black geographic study of land shaped by the consolidation of white power, the Robinson and Lowe methodology of working across archival and spatial segregation to understand racial capitalism and inflecting this with an impulse inspired from, but not identical to Simpson's land as pedagogy and Eve Tuck's land education. In this, we bring our students (and ourselves) out into the landscape to transform our own relations to that land, the institutions, and one another.

The Landback Abolition Project

In 2022, Sara Smith and Danielle Purifoy ran the project in two sections of a First Year Seminar on “the politics of everyday life,” the upper division “Global Environmental Justice,” and “Political Geography.” Students were provided a theoretical framework for understanding place-based research in relation to global processes and were introduced to a set of archival sources curated by archivist Sarah Carrier. Student response was moving and exceeded expectations. Since that time, we have run the project in two additional AAAD courses taught by Petal Samuel and Maya Berry, and in fall 2024 we piloted the first semester-length dedicated “Landback Abolition Project” course in Geography.

The project was necessarily shaped by our positionalities, though we have written as “we,” here we clarify these positions. Danielle: I am a Black queer person who grew up in North Carolina, and a descendant of enslaved peoples from across the U.S. South, including South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. As a youth, I spent several years attending STEM camp at UNC Chapel Hill. As a UNC faculty member, I have a commitment to collaborating with people who want to see the university made accountable for its histories of slavery and land theft, along with its contemporary ties to colonialism and genocide, and to foster the re-emergence of epistemic traditions that can support current and future generations to more abundant, collaborative, and pro-social ways of knowing. James: I am a Black scholar situated on stolen lands and territories in the US South, on a campus built by the labor of stolen peoples. Formerly working on Lenapehoking at the University of Delaware, collaborative climate adaptation efforts with the state-recognized Lenape Indian Tribe informed much of my approach to landback and abolition work in the university, which centers land repatriation and incorporating community members from outside the university as producers of knowledge. Sara: I am a white settler who moved to the South for this position in 2009, but previous generations of my family have roots in South Carolina. In 14 years, this place and people have taught me to more deeply consider my relationship and ethical responsibilities to this new home; as a white settler scholar the work of repair must inform all my work. I carry white anxieties about overstepping, imposing, or being too endpoint-oriented (vs. process-oriented and community-driven); I have been grateful to be changed by this work and find joy in using my situated position as a white woman to generate conversations about whiteness and structural racism in ways that can engage students from a variety of backgrounds and disarm some students’ preconceptions.

Our decision to name our work the Landback Abolition Project was both an impulse that stuck and remains an ongoing site of discussion. First, landback and abolition are sometimes discussed as separate struggles, but if we begin from the land relations here at our institution, this is impossible—these struggles are profoundly intertwined. Second, landback and abolition are always incomplete projects: does this mean we risk turning them into metaphors? Or in this work of naming do we also name our intentions and goals so that we cannot allow the work of the project to be diluted? In the name, we declare that our goals are the repair of land theft and enslavement through a radical reworking of relations to land and people in this place. The use of the terms “landback,” and “abolition,” also normalizes these as goals, and as legitimate subjects of study within our institution. When asked in a classroom visit how we can use such terms and study these issues during our anti-DEI era, we pointed to the fact that students engaged in our project have experienced quite positive feedback—awards and opportunities to present at conferences. We remain committed to advancing this project to practice the values that expand the epistemic possibilities of the university, rather than foreclose them.

In the first iteration of this class project, student groups could choose their own research questions (e.g., “What is the value of the land UNC resides on?”; “How has UNC interacted with native groups over time?”). They came to these questions after course readings and lectures on land as pedagogy and land as commodity. The initial prompt read:

What happens if we start from where we are? Can we pursue justice without recognizing how we fit into global power structures? Simpson (2017) and Bruno (2023) both suggest we can learn by starting from the land. Táíwò, Lowe, and Robinson tell us that all capitalism is racial capitalism, and that our world has been shaped by difference-making practices of colonization and exploitation (Lowe, 2015; Robinson, 1983; Táíwò, 2022). We are part of this story! In this assignment, you will use primary sources from the library or other research and work in groups to develop research questions that we should take up as (unequal) participants in the university system. We will make a collaborative story map about the university as part of global stories of Indigenous dispossession, enslavement of people from Africa, and ongoing colonial patterns of gentrification, resource extraction, and even research.

Students developed ArcGIS StoryMaps weaving maps, photographs, and other archival materials into narratives about the university, and we began further developing the outlines of the project, creating a community form and holding a community call to solicit questions. Questions were substantive and provocative, for example, “Why does the university continue to have police on campus? Why are renaming buildings and conducting highly scripted public conversations about this history the university's primary modes of engaging these issues?” “How did the university influence and inform the zoning decisions made to house Black workers who built the university?” “Who were some of the prominent individuals involved in [slavery and dispossession], and how did they shape University policies and structures?” PhD student, Frankie Bauer, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, contributed the crucial questions: “Whose lands are we using for ‘Land Back’? What does ‘Land Back’ mean when in an institutional context? Where can the community become involved in the process? What hurdles must be overcome to make the ‘Land Back’ movement at the university viable?”

Subsequent classes could also look at these community questions as potential starting points: our long-term goal is that as this builds momentum, it can become a resource for community members. The community call conversation was also a reflection of the challenges of doing reparative work from inside an institution that has perpetuated harm: even though people showed up, they also expressed profound mistrust and skepticism.

In Sara's Fall 2022 course, Mikayah Locklear, a Lumbee student already interested in archives, was taken by the question of Native archives when we visited Wilson Library. Locklear read aloud to the class a selection from the Surveyor General John Lawson's 1709 A new Voyage to North Carolina and spoke to how these words portrayed Native life in this place, and to the lack of Native voices speaking to their experience (Rhodes, 2023). Locklear's participation led to a visit to the CIC, and then an ongoing project to build an archive of Native UNC. We invited current and former Native students to an event at the American Indian Center asking the question: what would Landback look like at the university? These kinds of conversations are essential to slowly working toward community, but also for revealing the complexity and challenge of working in an institution whose history has engendered profound mistrust. These conversations have led to two Wilson Archives events focused on Native life in which the archivists talked about the existing materials and CIC members were able to spend time in the archives both finding material that told the story of Native life at the university, and in which they encountered familiar names or even family in the archives. This work is now ongoing through an oral history training with CIC and now this work taken up by CIC and supported by our project, to build a Native archive.

In Danielle's 2023 Political Geography course, students took questions and themes provided by the community survey and developed several group projects based on the themes of “family,” “labor,” “Black women at the university,” “escheated property,” and “landmarks.” Following library sessions with Sarah Carrier, the groups created projects from videos to podcasts to websites. As one example, a group developed a website tracing the history of the Kenan family, from their roots in the UK and Europe, to their intermarriage with other prominent UNC-connected families, to the ubiquity of the Kenan name embedded in buildings, schools, and centers. Students reflected on the profound absence of these histories within their existing curricula, even in the humanities and social sciences, and considered how their research for the project altered their perception of the university and their role in it as tuition-paying, residential “customers” of an institution still deeply invested in colonial epistemologies, land relations, treatment of labor, and evisceration of Black and Native traditions.

In the 2023–2024 academic year, the project continued through two geography courses and Petal Samuel's AAAD Course, as well as events asking: “what would landback and abolition look like here?” This included inviting descendants of people enslaved by the founders of the university to share their vision of what form repair might take, if it is even possible. Danita Mason-Hogans spoke on her family's ties to the people enslaved by the settler-enslaver Mason and Hogans families, and on how the university had affected not only families like hers, but also, through a range of practices, shaped the entire town and region—being the basis for her call for repair work in the K-12 school system; which developed in part to serve the university (Krueger, 2020; Serrano, 2023). kynita stringer-stanback spoke to her relations to the university and to the ongoing plantation mindset that shapes not only university politics but how those politics spill out beyond campus.

In Petal Samuel's AAAD's “Introduction to African American and Diaspora Studies,” students again engaged a curated set of archival materials documenting the roles of slavery and Native land dispossession in shaping the university under archivist Sarah Carrier's guidance. They were tasked a short archival analysis paper responding these questions: (a) What new things did you learn about UNC's connection to slavery through this assignment?; (b) What questions are you left with that you might like to pursue further (i.e., what was missing from the archive)?; and (c) In what contemporary ways do you see the legacies of slavery and Native land dispossession persisting on UNC's campus? The assignment invites students to reflect on what we can know and what we cannot, on the vital importance—and limitations—of the archive in redressing historical violence. Our labor is at once understanding what stories the archive can help us unearth and, in Saidiya Hartman's words, “listening for the unsaid” in an effort to “recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features” (Hartman, 2008b: 3).

Student groups were tasked with producing a photo essay documenting the ongoing impact of slavery and Native land dispossession and/or the sites and practices of creativity, thriving, and resistance that speak back to these legacies. Several students, for example, focused on land and the built environment, generating photo essays that unveiled how quotidian mainstays of campus—such as the campus’ fieldstone walls—evidence the foundational importance of enslaved laborers who (literally and figuratively) built the university. Many students reflected in their papers that this work helped them to better understand the precise mechanisms by which universities benefited directly and indirectly from slavery and Native land dispossession. (One student, for example, noted that the assignment “pushed [her] to look a little closer at the ways UNC more indirectly benefited from the institution of slavery, such as [through] the use of escheats to obtain funding for the university through the selling of human beings.”) More than merely expanding students’ storehouses of knowledge about the university, however, this work empowered students to generate their own creative archives of these legacies.

In the spring 2024 Political Geography course, students developed “metaprojects” to provide a better understanding of what had been learned up to that point, as overlaps in projects had emerged, and to develop social media content to make the research publicly accessible to audiences beyond the university. Students were split into groups charged with developing a social media story specific to a theme. These themes included: “family,” “slavery,” and “land,” among others. This research was interrupted by the expulsion and banning from campus of some students in the course for their involvement in the Gaza solidarity encampment. However, the experience of the encampment, both for the expelled students and their classmates enrolled in the course, provided yet another entry point for a nuanced understanding of the contemporary colonial university. Due to campus bans, our final gathering was held off campus at the public library, and students discussed how the brutal dismantling of the encampment and ensuing protests by campus police—backed by the chancellor—was a critical example of how the U.S. university is a partner in the continuation of the U.S. colonial project, this time by squashing opposition to the country's deep investment in Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestine.

In Fall 2024, while this article was under review, Sara taught the first semester length “Landback Abolition Project” class, in which students read across Black and Indigenous place-based scholarship, researched what other universities have done toward repair, took and created walking tours, and created research projects building on the community question, with labor and aid from PhD students James Bryan, Kayla Roulhac and Kalin Despain and undergraduate Mackie Jackson. In Spring 2025 Maya Berry taught the project in her Introduction to AAAD course, culminating in the students creating their own walking tour, attended by project team members. We are currently building our engagement with descendant Danita Mason-Hogans working on responses to Black land dispossession, creating new oral history accountings of descendants’ experiences, and cultivating a new relationship with the Stagville Descendants Council. Alongside this descendant work, this summer will see the furthering of the work toward the archive of Native life at UNC, with both oral history and document collection and curation undertaken by two Native students funded by the project, Kalila Arreola and Bella Garcia, who have begun the process of collecting oral histories with current and former Native student leaders, after a series of meetings between project members and the CIC. We are also working with Sarah Carrier and Kerry Bannen toward further research on the Cherokee Land Sales books.

Conclusions

In the 2022 First Nations Graduate Circle petition, a central demand was to, “Examine and publicize the Native and settler-colonial origins of UNC … UNC must grapple with its past and present as a settler-colonial institution to make genuine and productive changes.” As scholars of place, space, and power relations, this charge is for us: toward place-based work that examines our own role in our home institutions and collectively take steps toward fulfilling asks from community members who have been harmed by and who have been instrumental to this institution. It is incumbent on us to understand our own ethical position and responsibility in relation to land, labor, and life. We cannot count on our institutions to hold themselves to account, and, in fact, we are facing a right-wing retrenchment which requires more of us. In the face of recent attacks on DEI, rather than reconsider this work, we have found it to be more crucial and also found students to seek it out as an ethical anchor as well: student activists share our materials or take up some of the practices from our classes (such as the alternative walking tour). These interactions across institutional hierarchies are “rehearsals” that both practice different kinds of ways of being in relation and build up an archive of documentation for a different future and a wider base of students, staff, and faculty who know this history. In collaboratively researching our institutions we can build community and begin the work of landback, abolition, decolonization, reparations, and repair in the places we inhabit. This requires acknowledgment that this is incomplete work that can only be done in community, and that it must be done with the intention of material change and supporting justice movements. In these first two years we have learned most acutely the entanglement of the Black and Native histories and intertwined futures of this place but have learned that this is slow work that will always be incomplete.

The land stories above remind us we cannot understand our place without an accounting of both Indigenous and Black Geographies, and the necessary theoretical work provided by Indigenous and Black Studies. The structures of the institution and scholarship itself, however, comprise a challenge. On the one hand, scholarship and institutional structures at times unhelpfully conflate and flatten categories such as Black and Indigenous into a general minoritized positionality—though intertwined histories have differently positioned rights, legal claims, and identity frameworks. In the case of North Carolina, education is specifically a site of contention where Black and Native identities have been framed in opposition (Elliott, 2013; Hiraldo, 2020; 50–51). Diversity frameworks may assume all minoritized groups ask or require the same thing from the university. There is sometimes also sometimes an assumption that Black people are never Indigenous, or Indigenous people are never Black. In practice these intersections and fragmentations mean that there is not a long-standing infrastructure of relationships between the already over-burdened departments, faculty, and staff who have worked on these topics. Scholars and staff who work with Black and Indigenous communities are also more likely to face high service burdens and other labor requests that make building a new project at these intersections particularly difficult. These challenges also underscore the urgency of this labor.

The challenges above shape the contours of what we can and cannot accomplish, but one lesson from this work is there is a seemingly unending desire from students to engage in it: students’ turnout at events consistently exceeds expectations, and students contrast how it feels to do a regular research project versus studying this land and our institution. This becomes a challenge as our time has been too limited to provide opportunities to all students asking to work on the project; we face labor and logistical problems to learn this history alongside students while also providing for public engagement and community building while also working to manage the usually promising but sometimes messy student outcomes. Thus far, we have begun in the classroom and community for strategic reasons: because this began as an experiment, and because the project needs to be fundamentally engaged with community members, and these relationships can only grow slowly. We aspire to broader engagement when as the project grows in infrastructural strength from its shoestring budget and as a second layer of research and service on top of our existing labor; at the same time, these limitations are in part because we have sought to retain some necessary independence from the institution.

Even as we hold space for the meaning of landback and abolition to emerge relationality and slowly, when we decenter settler futures and center Black and Indigenous life, we see the possibility of transforming student, faculty, and staff political relations to land—and making decolonization more than metaphor. This begins, we hope, by insisting that those of us embedded in colonial institutions ask: what is the history of this place, and of my people to this place? How does that history shape our engagement with one another and the institution? What is made possible and impossible by how our lands and institutions are structured by the history of dispossession and displacement, and what are we working toward?