Indigenous Engagement in Place

At the start of 2024, Carleton received a $1.5M grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund its Indigenous Engagement in Place Initiative. This three year initiative aims to expand curricular and scholarly collaborations with Indigenous partners to enliven learning, teaching, and public scholarship in the humanities and across the liberal arts. 

Learn More about the Grant

“Indigenous Engagement in Place” emerges from Carleton’s attempts to live into our land acknowledgment through honest storytelling and respectful relationships with Dakota and Ojibwe peoples and builds upon ongoing Indigenous engagement efforts at Carleton.

Recent activities include:

• Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) courses and projects have deepened partnerships between Indigenous organizations and tribal partners, faculty, staff, and students.
• Convocations, workshops, museum exhibitions, and other recent campus-wide events have helped tell the diverse stories of Indigenous peoples.
• The College issued a land acknowledgement in 2020.
• Carleton hosted its first presidential delegation from a Native Nation with a visit by the Prairie Island Tribal Council president and other members in October 2021.
• An Indigenous student organization was rechartered in 2021.
• Carleton hired Marcy Averill as our inaugural Indigenous Communities Liaison in September 2022.
• 3 Summer 2024 Student Research Collaborations
• 3 Summer 2024 Faculty Course Redesign Collaborations
• An Indigenous Peoples’ Day Celebration featuring the Warrior Women exhibition and film screening (Click here to view the Warrior Women Project’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day Instagram Stories Takeover)
• A Winter Break 2024 LTC Workshop
• The development of an Ethics of Indigenous Engagement course taught Winter 2025 
• Numerous class visits by Indigenous speakers