Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Photo: Phil Dembinski '08.
Welcome to the website for Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at Columbia College Chicago.
As a college, we are committed to an anti-racist campus that takes head-on the systemic issues of racial and other forms of discrimination that permeate the whole of our society. One of our central foci in the area of DEI is enhancing our curriculum to challenge the hegemonic emphasis on canonical cultural and artistic traditions, which often result in a lack of diverse narratives. Along with our engagement with curriculum, we are committed to addressing issues of power and privilege in each of the disciplines we teach as well as all of the various structures that we use to support our students, faculty, and staff.
Learn more about the Academic DEI mission.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We collectively acknowledge that Columbia College Chicago occupies the stolen ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg—Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, as well as the Miami, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Illinois, Sac and Fox nations. Although the state of Illinois has only one federally recognized tribal land area, we acknowledge, support, and advocate for the sovereignty of all Indian nations, for the historic Indigenous communities in Illinois, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live in the Chicagoland area, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we reaffirm our College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Mission statement, affirm Indigenous sovereignty, and will hold Columbia College Chicago more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
Digital Land Acknowledgment
Columbia College Chicago occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg—Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, as well as the as well as the Miami, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox nations. Today, we are connecting online via a vast array of servers and computer devices. In the United States, much of this infrastructure sits on stolen land acquired under the extractive logic of white settler expansion. As an organization, we recognize this history and uplift the sovereignty of Indigenous people, data, and territory. We also commit to dismantling ongoing settler-colonial practices and their material implications on our digital worlds. By offering this Land Acknowledgment, we reaffirm our College’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Mission statement and will hold Columbia College Chicago more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
If land acknowledgments are part of your practice, please feel free to put your land acknowledgement in the chat. And if you’d like to learn whose land you are on, visit https://native-land.ca/
Call to Action for Indigenous Communities
While land acknowledgments are intended to be respectful, they oversimplify complex tribal histories and fail to recognize the ongoing effects of colonization that tribal communities continue to live with. Some people, therefore, prefer using a Call to Action for Indigenous Communities.
The following sample Call to Action is adapted from EcoTrust.org. We encourage you to visit their website: https://ecotrust.org/call-to-action-for-indigenous-communities/
In place of a land acknowledgment, we are asking you to support Indigenous communities by taking action. We ask that you take steps to:
- Insist that the United States respect tribal sovereignty and uphold its responsibility to tribes, which includes appropriate levels of federal funding.
- Elect officials and judges that understand tribal governments, relationships, and law.
- Invest in tribal economies.
- Challenge and reject stereotypes about Indigenous people.
- Insist that your children and grandchildren are taught accurate information about the histories, cultures, and contemporary lives of Indigenous peoples in your school systems. And,
- Inform yourself about issues affecting Indigenous communities and speak up.
