Native American & Indigenous Studies at PennNAIS at Penn is one of the partners in a 2021-2023 "Just Futures" grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support "Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present," a project directed by Tulia Falleti, Professor of Political Science. "Dispossessions in the Americas" is an interdisciplinary project that aims to document territorial, embodied, and cultural heritage dispossessions in the Americas from 1492 to the present, and to outline how the restoration of land, embodiments, and cultural values can recover histories and promote restorative justice.
“It’s very important to highlight the historic nature of many of these structural inequities and to put forward proposals that can restore hope and justice. Dispossessions in the Americas is not only about documenting what was lost, but also about decolonizing the way we research and working with communities to propose measures for healing.”
At Penn, collaborators include faculty, curators, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from the department of Africana studies, the Latin American and Latinx studies program, the Native American and Indigenous studies program, the gender, sexuality, and women’s studies program, the Penn Cultural Heritage Center of the Penn Museum, and the department of biostatistics, epidemiology, and informatics in the Perelman School of Medicine.Co-investigators include Margaret Bruchac, associate professor of anthropology; Ricardo Castillo-Neyra, assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology; Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, associate professor of history; Michael Hanchard, chair and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies; Jonathan D. Katz, associate professor of practice of history of art and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies; Richard M. Leventhal, professor of anthropology; and Michael Z. Levy, associate professor of epidemiology.
For more informatiion, see: "$5 Million Mellon Grant for Work on Dispossessions in the Americas," University of Pennsylvania Almanac, February 16, 2021.