By Marisa Young | Staff Writer
Everyone is invited to Baylor’s celebration of Native American Heritage Month, according to Keller senior Julianna Canas.
Native American Heritage Month is a time for everyone to recognize the history of Indigenous communities locally and worldwide and to highlight the contributions the community has made that often go underrepresented, according to Canas, the president of the Society for the Advancement of Chicano Hispanics and Native Americans in STEM.
Canas said she thinks Baylor is “on the right track” in providing representation of the Native community.
“They create spaces where students are able to interact with indigenous culture and learn more about it, because obviously when you’re not seeing it, you don’t have a connection to it,” Canas said. “You don’t really know what it is.”
Beginning in 1993, the Native American Student Association hosted an annual powwow in the Ferrell Center. It was a celebration complete with singing, dancing, drumming and traditional regalia. However, this tradition died out in the early 2000s, leading to a period of underrepresentation of the indigenous community at Baylor, according to Canas.
“There were upwards of 20 years where we weren’t really hearing from indigenous voices,” Canas said. “I think with the rise of our student organization and having Native American representation in our name, we’re able to kind of bring that back to Baylor.”
SACNAS partners with the Office of Multicultural Affairs to host annual events such as Neighbor Nights and Native Voices, which give voice to the indigenous community at Baylor and provide non-indigenous students the opportunity to learn something new, Canas said.
Canas recounted how at the Native Voices event last year, she witnessed a vast sense of community and celebration between Native and non-Native students.
“There was a moment at the end of our event where we were able to participate as one huge group with the dancers and see their beautiful regalia and hear these beautiful songs from native history together,” Canas said. “I think a lot of people were hesitant to jump in, feeling like it wasn’t their place, but our dancers were just so encouraging, and then once everybody saw that it was OK to participate, everybody jumped in and had an amazing time.”
Canas said events like this paired with students “wanting to learn” are crucial to the advancement of Native culture.
“I think the next step for Baylor would be to start talking about the history that Baylor had with the local tribes,” Canas said. “Let’s start getting back into that conversation.”
Both Baylor’s current campus and the original campus in Independence reside on land that the indigenous peoples originally occupied and were dispossessed of. The university presented a Land Acknowledgement in November 2022, acknowledging this fact and stating its intent to strive toward sustainable relationships with indigenous communities.
The Quadrangle has been long believed to be a burial site for a Native American tribe, and in 2022, Baylor hired expert archaeologists to survey the area. They concluded that the land was not a burial site, but they found artifacts indicating general habitation on the Quad. According to Canas, there used to be a plaque indicating this history on the Quad, but it was eventually removed.
Associate Director of Multicultural Affairs Trinity Gordon said one of the best things students can do to celebrate Native culture year-round is to educate themselves.
“Learning the stories of others, being able to be appreciative of where others come from, that’s something that we all have access to,” Gordon said. “A lot of barriers exist, but there are also a lot of possibilities. So I think the more that we can look for those possibilities, the more that all of us can connect to the stories and cultures of life.”
To further advance education on indigenous heritage, Gordon said the Office of Multicultural Affairs has an education and training wing, which takes input from students and faculty to “build out and evolve” their provisions.
For more information on the indigenous community’s presence at Baylor, students and faculty can reach out to the Office of Multicultural Affairs or the Resident Indigenous Scholar at Baylor, Derek Ross.
