For educators to truly teach somewhere, they must first acknowledge the significance of their location, said Victoria Muñoz, a psychology and gender studies professor at Wells College, in a discussion at Akwe:kon Nov. 4.

Muñoz, along with Stephanie Waterman, a citizen of the Onondaga Nation and assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Rochester, led a discussion on the importance of recognizing the cultural issues inherent in indigenous peoples' education and research. The event was one of the activities organized on campus in recognition of American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.

As a Puerto Rican, Muñoz said she feels a personal affinity with members of indigenous cultures. By showing the similarities between midcentury paintings of the Maori people of New Zealand and the Taino people of Puerto Rico, she highlighted the need for context in historical analysis. She illustrated common academic misperceptions of the Native American interactions with Europeans with photos of biased monuments along Highway 90 as examples.

"When students take classes about the history of the area, they begin after Gen. John Sullivan's destruction of Cayuga Castle," she said, referring to the 1779 military campaign that devastated the Cayuga and Iroquois homelands in upstate New York. As a result, she said, "Most students don't know anything about the ground they're on except whether there's grass on it."

To combat this lack of knowledge, Muñoz said that all of her courses are based on being honest about racial history. Although she acknowledged that this seemed unrelated to her field, she also asserted that it is impossible to learn in a cultural vacuum.

"The process of understanding where [one] is standing is actually an ethical question, not just a geographic one," she said.

Waterman also addressed the need for academic context, citing many studies that peg Native students as unwilling to assimilate into college communities and therefore are doomed to fail in their pursuit of a degree. But Waterman's studies have found that Native students' support from their families was actually more likely to push them toward academic success.

"Students frequently transfer to schools that allow them to commute from home," she said. "But that doesn't mean they aren't committed to their studies."

Unfortunately, she added, the common lack of support for Native students on college campuses means that they often struggle to find their academic foothold.

"There's very little actual mentoring that goes on," she said. "A professor or staff member who actually takes the time to reach out of their comfort zone to get to know a student is very rare."

In a roundtable discussion after their presentations, both Muñoz and Waterman recognized the difficulty of bringing Native issues to the attention of the Cornell community. However, they maintained, that does not mean that raising awareness is impossible.

"I think it needs to be in person," said Waterman. "Students need to talk to other students about these issues. We haven't had a lot of success working from top to bottom; I think we'll have better luck from the ground up."

Kathleen Jercich '11 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.