“These natives were killed for their land,” said Alvin Harvey, SM ’20, an Aero/Astro PhD student and member of the Navajo Nation, in a pre-meeting presentation. faculty this spring. “As a land-grant college, MIT has an obligation to support natives and students.”
MIT is creating a tenure track position in Native American studies, starting in 2023, and adding two new positions in the MLK Visiting Scholars and Scholars Program, at least one of that will be allocated to an expert in Native American studies. Over the next two years, the Institute will also support two graduate students in MIT Indigenous Language Initiative, a master’s program launched in 2003. MIT will also fund a study of Walker and his role. “MIT has a responsibility to unearth and illuminate that history so we can learn from it,” Reif wrote.
As David S. Lowry ’03, Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies, teaching 21H.283 this year, told the faculty, facing hard truths “really creates the future of MIT where all all of us, across communities, across fields, can begin to care about each other.”
