At a university that bears an indigenous name, you would expect a campus celebration for Indigenous People’s Day. At Quinnipiac University, this was not the case. There was nothing on or around campus that acknowledged the day according to Mohegan tribe member and Quinnipiac University student, Kiara Tanta-Quidgeon.
For the small population of indigenous students who attend the university, the lack of Native voices on campus is enough to feel excluded.
“At home, we are all united by our history and our passion for our people,” Tanta-Quidgeon said. “We are all intertwined by not only our ancestry and our blood, but by the love of our land and our culture. This is not something that I have at Quinnipiac, but it is something that I want for current and future indigenous students and will fight for until it is achieved.”
“I always felt that by coming here I was losing a huge part of myself.” — Kiara Tanta-Quidgeon
Tanta-Quidgeon, a sophomore biology major, was raised in Connecticut by a single mother and her indigenous heritage played a huge role in her life. Growing up, she lived near the Mohegan reservation in Montville, Connecticut and would attend the celebrations called powwows and sometimes even danced in them. When she decided on where to go to college, it was a tough decision for her.
“I came here because I wanted to be close to home but I always felt that by coming here I was losing a huge part of myself,” Tanta-Quidgeon said. “I wanted QU to be a place I could call home, but a huge part of what I’ve always known as home was missing. There was a significant lack of inclusion for indigenous students and an absence of indigenous voice in the Quinnipiac community.”
This year, Quinnipiac University was ranked the Princeton Review’s No. 1 university for little race/class interaction.
Quinnipiac University, with a 73 percent white student demographic, has a low enrollment of Native American students and other minority groups despite its indigenous name. According to the 2016 IPEDS Data Feedback Report, 0.1 percent of students enrolled in the university identified as Native American.This number translates to 14 Native American students enrolled in a university of about 10,000 students.
The low number of enrolled indigenous students has led students to start questioning the lack of diversity on campus.
“We are predominantly a white, settler-colonists institute that uses a name with little to no credit given to the people and the history of this place,” Tanta-Quidgeon said. “If they didn’t care about the history of their own how were they to care about mine?”
Tanta-Quidgeon explained that a lack of inclusion looks like it does now: an overwhelming majority of the population being Caucasian.
“A lack of inclusion is a lack of diversity and a lack of celebration of differences,” she said. “Our groups and organizations do an amazing job of implementing minority voices in the community and celebrating their cultures and differences, and that is what I want for indigenous students.”
Before this year, Tanta-Quidgeon said she only knew two other indigenous students on campus. And both of them were her cousins. She said that she only met a few more Native students this year so the number is still small.
Despite the low number of indigenous students enrolled, there is no place for these students to gather and celebrate their heritage.
“There is no place I felt totally comfortable sharing the most important parts of myself and no place where I could find students to bond to and unite with like I did with the tribal members back home,” she said. “I mean there wasn’t even a place on the QU website where you could even learn or see that Quinnipiac University is on the land of a Native American tribe and uses their name.”
While the university has added a more extensive about page to its website, there is no mention of the Quinnipiac tribe and that the university resides on Native land.
This lack of education about the land the university resides on and the name it holds has been a growing issue in the community which has led to new inclusivity programs like the Teach-In on Indigeneity to start taking place.
This Teach-In took place in the student center on Nov. 19 and addressed a wide range of issues. Professors from areas of history, philosophy and law lectured about indigeneity throughout history to educate those who attended about the history before settlers came and to show the detrimental impact of colonialism on the Native people. Around 77 students swiped in at the Teach-In according to Executive Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute, Sean Duffy.
Of the multiple professors and lecturers that spoke, two indigenous students stood in front of peers and faculty to discuss what it was like to be an indigenous student at Quinnipiac. Tanta-Quidgeon was one of them.
Tanta-Quidgeon discussed her heritage and upbringing, but described one of the most difficult parts of being a indigenous student on campus was the lack of clubs and organizations that brought Native students together. She said that through these new initiatives at Quinnipiac University there’s more awareness and they are starting to create student-led groups for indigenous students.
“I do have a good number of friends at school however, I am always excited when I come across another student who is Native American,” senior psychology major and Mohegan tribe member, Kristina Jacobs said. “It is a really good feeling to have people who understand your culture and way of life and to share something with someone that is so close to your heart.”
Lala Forrest, a first year medical student at Quinnipiac University, was the second indigenous student to stand in front of students and faculty to discuss the barriers of being a Native American student.
Originally from the Pit River tribe in California, Forrest spent the first year of her life on the reservation with her single mother. She moved off the reservation as a toddler because her mother wanted to provide her with opportunities and resources that weren’t available on the reservation.
For her, college was only ever an option, not something she had to do.
In high school, she found a program that helped first-generation Native American students apply to college. She spent four years at University of California San Diego before applying to medical school. She discussed at the Teach-In the low enrollment of Native students to medical schools and revealed that in 2018 out of 30,000 Native college students, four applied to medical school and zero got in.
“This is a call for medical schools to increase their representation of Native Americans in medicine,” Forrest said. “And this is important because Native students want to go back and help their communities, they want to help people who are suffering disproportionately in nearly every health category.”
Forrest then discussed a “pipeline project” the University of Minnesota has for indigenous students to help them prepare for medical school. They start preparing these students in middle school and provide support for these students all the way until they get to medical school. She explained that Minnesota showed support of Native students with 13 percent of the faculty at the school being indigenous and having Native faculty members on the admissions committee.
She wrapped it all back around to being an indigenous student at Quinnipiac and the purpose of the new events being introduced to the community.
“Our purpose is to foster a campus-wide conversation on indigenous identities, histories and culture,” Forrest said. “The goal I think of this initiative is to work towards social justice, equity and inclusivity for indigenous people and how we need to be bearing an indigenous name and residing on indigenous lands be culturally responsiveness but also responsible with that.”
The school is also working with an organization called the Akomawt Educational Initiative, a group that travels around east coast schools, connecting colleges with indigenous communities.
“These are the types of things we would like to change, the structure at the university,” Chris Newell, Passamaquoddy tribe member and one of the leaders of the Akomawt Educational Initiative said. “One that is welcoming to all people.”
Three members circulated through speaking at the podium. They talked about indigenous people today and how they are still fighting for rights. They discussed the Standing Rock protests, the importance of accepting different forms of knowledge as credible and what Quinnipiac can do to keep this type of inclusive conversation alive on campus.
They also visited campus on Dec. 2 and professors at the university were able to individually meet with the team to discuss how to create curricula that is more inclusive of Native histories, culture and knowledge.
“Being a native student at a predominately white school can be difficult, especially when some of our experiences are so different,” senior psychology major and Mohegan tribe member Lauren Jacobs said. “I think that Quinnipiac should advocate and try to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day and just create more awareness and more information regarding native culture. Further, I think that Quinnipiac should make it more known that Quinnipiac is named after a tribe.”
So why has the university waited until 2019 to start this type of conversation?
According to Duffy, past presidents prioritized establishing the university.
“There were bits and drabs [of events] over the years,” Duffy said. “The focus was really on bringing on what had been the Junior College of Commerce and limp through the ‘70s and ‘80s that way to its next level. Since then the student population has almost doubled in size and there had been a lot of programmatic growth and development that we were really focusing on as an institution.”
And the university has grown a lot since it first opened its doors in 1929.
Quinnipiac University was originally founded in 1929 under the name “The Connecticut College of Commerce” according to Duffy. At the time, the college only offered two year degrees but in 1950 the institution admitted the first four-year class.
Then in January of 1950, the college changed its name to “Quinnipiac College” after the students and faculty voted between four different names which were Nathan Hale, Ronan, Quinnipiac College and the College of Arts and Commerce, according to Duffy.
According to the 1951 Quinnipiac General Catalogue, the school’s comprehensive source of departamental, college and university-wide information, the school was originally named after the Quinnipiac plantations but according to Duffy the university was named after the Algonquin tribe that were named “Quinnipiac” which translates to “long water people.” When the tribe sold the land to white colonists, the settlers named the land Quinnipiac before changing it to New Haven according to honorary story teller for the Quinnipiac and adjunct professor at the university, Dorothy Howell.
But it is still unclear who the Quinnipiac were.
According to Howell, there isn’t much known about the tribe before white settlers came to the New Haven area. The tribe was small and in 1668 when settlers came to the land, the tribe sold the land to colonists who reserved a small piece for the Natives which is now looked at as one of the first Native American reservations in the United States according to Howell.
The tribe today is fragmented. According to Howell, many of the members have been adopted into the tribe just as she was. Howell believes current members have much to add to the university that could begin to establish new traditions just like Quinnipiac Weekend was once an integral part of the community.
In the early 1950s, the university celebrated its first ever ‘Quinnipiac Weekend’ during the first weekend of May. According to the General Catalogue, this was a celebration of the founding of the university.
“The weekend was originally meant to celebrate Quinnipiac’s heritage and give the students a few days to celebrate being part of this community,” Duffy said.
The university held a variety of events for students including shows, a picnic at Holiday Hill in Cheshire and a prom at night according to one 1967 issue of the Chronicle. However, there was no celebration or mention of the indigenous people and land the school is named after. The weekend was more focused on celebrating the founding of the university rather than the name.
The university officially stopped sponsoring Quinnipiac weekend festivities after a student was killed in 2007 walking across Whitney Avenue according to a 2016 Chronicle article.
In that same year, the famous ‘Legend of the Bobcat’ was integrated into the community to connect the university’s mascot, name and students to the school and keep the sense of community alive. But it’s a story created by students at the school rather than a legend from the Quinnipiac tribe.
“For one thing, we really ought to replace the bogus legends with stories from the actual Quinnipiac history we can discover,” Howell said.
According to Newell there is a legend behind the Sleeping Giant that is told by the tribe and the community should adopt that version instead.
“Indigenizing Quinnipiac means tying it to the land,” he said. “Maybe not tying it to a student-created legend because with what we’ve seen with legends that were created and the way the internet is, they become fact to some people.”
In 2001, the university decided to change the mascot of the school from the Braves to the Bobcats. After a recommendation by former university president, John Lahey, the institution abandoned the usage of a stereotypical Native American chief and transitioned to a more culturally appropriate mascot.
The university still has work to do according to Howell, but she thinks these new programs are a good start.
“In brief, the one thing we owe the land we occupy, whether in honor of the Quinnipiacs or as an obligation we should all be accepting, is respect,” Howell said. “How we express that respect will be up to the QU community. The decisions are beyond you and me, but one day of lectures, one month dedicated to Native Americans, one pow-wow, one year of indigenous programs are no more than a start.”