Sthecarlet & Black Is Grinnell College living up to its land acknowledgement?

By Cadence Chen chencade@grinnell.edu

In the five years leading up to the publication of Grinnell College’s land acknowledgment in 2021, zero students who self-identified as American Indian or Native Alaskan enrolled at the College, according to the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data Set (IPEDS). As Stephanie BadSoldier Snow `03 heard the statement read for the first time at the College’s Multicultural Alumni Reunion in November 2021 over Zoom, she heard a land acknowledgement with historical inaccuracies.

The College’s official land acknowledgement refers to the land the College resides on as the Meskwaki, Sauk and Ioway people’s “ancestral territory.”

“We’re woodland people from the eastern part of what is now the United States and Canada,” said Snow, who currently lives on the Meskwaki settlement with her family and is of mixed Indigenous descent. “We’re not originally from Iowa.”

The Meskwaki people are displaced peoples and have been forcibly relocated from Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. The Meskwaki Nation, formally known as the Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, is the only federally recognized tribe in Iowa.

In 1857, the Meskwaki people purchased their first 80 acres of land in Iowa, which Snow said was to protect their land, culture and people. The Meskwaki people currently own around 7,000 acres of land. The Meskwaki Settlement is located in Tama County, less than 30 miles from the College.

Leslie Gregg-Jolly, senior faculty member in biology and interim chief diversity officer from 2018 to 2019, described the land acknowledgement as a “dynamic document,” which means the statement would be open to revisions as time goes on.