As reported by MIT News “An historic delegation of 10 Indigenous artists and advisors recently gathered on MIT’s campus. Hosted by the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab, they were welcomed in a traditional smudging ceremony with MIT Interfaith Chaplain Nina Lytton.”
This is just one of MIT’s many initiatives to promote new ways of knowing that strip away the colonialist odour of the enlightenment and the systemic racism of Western science, replacing it with the indigenous wisdom of people whose stolen land MIT continues to occupy.
Multidisciplinary Indigiqueer artist Anne Riley, a dark matter garden expert, and T’uy’t’tatanat Cease Wyss, known for remediating soil that has been contaminated with colonial toxins, were joined by Tiare Ribeaux, whose “magical realist exploration of spirituality, labor, and the natural environment, draw upon the structure of dreamworlds and Hawaiian cosmology to critique both social and ecological imbalances.”
“I learned more about my feminism in terms of the care I put into on- and off-boarding people’s experiences of my work,” gushed blackface mask dancer Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory. “And I learned about seeing ancestors and spirit infusing the technologies we use in both a historic and real-time context.”
Gaze upon the face of the diverse, equitable, and inclusive future of STEM education and wonder, what will the virtuous arbiters of MIT culture come up with next?