Reflecting and Expressing Gratitude

This newsletter marks a full calendar year of Whose Land? newsletters! We have accomplished a lot this year: We’ve expanded projects in Milwaukee, the Oneida Nation, Madison, and New York; we’ve gained a new level of support and commitment from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the Department of the Interior (DOI), Wisconsin Humanities, and K-12 schools and colleges; and we’ve introduced our most ambitious project to date in The People’s 250th and its accompanying mapping platform.

To bring the year to a close, we have some reflections, project updates, and a couple of announcements below. Before you read on, we want to express gratitude. Thank you for being a supporter of Whose Land?. As we head into 2025, we are planning to collaborate more with our supporters, giving you opportunities to participate in the planning and building of projects as well as giving you the recognition you deserve.

Adding a personal note, I want to express my own thanks for your support of Whose Land?. Descending from Taino ancestors whose histories have all but been erased by colonization, I am proud to be part of work that gives individuals, families, and communities the opportunity to memorialize what has made them for generations to come. Their descendants will not have to scavenge the ground for fragments of their own story. I am looking forward to continuing this fulfilling work with all of you in the year ahead.

Kayla

As part of our efforts to increase collaboration with supporters, we are officially launching our Friends of Whose Land? initiative. As a “Friend,” you will be an integral part of our visioning team. We will provide Friends an “under the hood” glimpse at what we do and invite them to offer feedback for projects and programs at key stages.

Friends receive:

• Invitations to join project brainstorming sessions

• Opportunities to comment on future projects, programs, and ideas before launch

• An Inside Look at our long-term programming vision

• An Inside Look at our funding strategies

We are grateful for input and support of all kinds! Consider becoming a Friend of the project. A donation to a specific project or to Whose Land? more generally is your only entry ticket. Make a donation today here:

Project Updates

Our inter-generational memory and dialogue project on federal Indian boarding schools, Oneida identity, and place has continued to grow. We have been organizing communication sessions and driving tours on the reservation with Oneida High School students and Oneida Elders. Project participants, old and young, have shared memories about places of meaning. They have recorded group conversations and conducted student-to-Elder and Elder-to-student recorded interviews. Now in its second year, the boarding school project will culminate in both the launch of a podcast and a student co-curated exhibition that will be displayed in the new Oneida Museum, opening in 2026.

And now onto a quick roundup of our many other current projects!

First, our Northside Community Archives Project will be incorporating the 2.0 version of our mapping platform, funded by Wisconsin Humanities. It will be used during community sessions in spring of 2025. The mapping platform is further being developed through an exciting new collaboration with UW-Milwaukee’s Digital Humanities Lab and American Geographical Library staff. Finally, the NEH Collaborative Research grant has allowed Dr. Levy to continue research for the Color of Farming in the Heartland book project. Over the past few months, Dr. Levy toured Wisconsin farms and historical societies, stopping in places such as Calumet County on the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago, the site of one of the first mixed Indigenous-Black community settlements in Wisconsin.

The People’s 250th seeks to provide an alternative narrative to the mainstream version of American history since 1776. Integrating histories of land with the overlapping multi-ethnic and multi-racial stories that have marked American lands, we hope to raise consciousness about ecology, race, and history and their interconnections. Individuals, families, and groups of all sizes and backgrounds are encouraged to participate.

If you’ve ever been interested in exploring the history of where you live or of another meaningful space, this project will provide tools to support that exploration and a platform to organize and share what you find. Watch for our invitation to join the project, which will run from summer 2025 to summer 2026. You can learn more about The People’s 250th by clicking the button below. Sign-ups will be opening in 2025.

We are so grateful for the amount of support we have gotten from our A Whose Land December initiative so far. Thank you to all who have donated. As is indicated by the name, A Whose Land December will continue through December 31st. If you or someone you know is interested in donating to Whose Land, you can do so here. If you have already donated and are looking for other ways to support Whose Land?, you can:

• subscribe to our newsletter and check out any newsletter issues you might have missed here,

• send this link to your friends so that they can subscribe,

• follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads using the links at the end of this email,

• reach out to us with feedback or project ideas,

• and participate in The People’s 250th!

Of course there will be more ways to support Whose Land in the new year, so stay tuned to see what new things we have up our sleeve!

Thanks and Happy Holidays,

The Whose Land? Team