Beginning in summer 2021, the Bucknell Humanities Center is home to an annual summer institute that develops out of a yearlong theme. The goal of the summer institute is to expand scholarly and pedagogical conversations; to unite intellectuals to undertake these interdisciplinary dialogues in place; and to situate the Bucknell Humanities Center as a hub for critical inquiry. The 2023 summer institute will be hosted virtually to allow individuals the opportunity to join from places across the globe.

The Bucknell Summer Institute is made possible by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Bucknell Humanities Center, Bucknell’s Dean of College of Arts & Sciences, and Bucknell’s Environmental Humanities Working Group.

Bucknell University is located on the ancestral homelands of the Susquehannock, Munsee, Shawnee and Lennai-Lenape peoples and member nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We wish to respectfully acknowledge our collective responsibility to these original stewards of the land, water and air upon which we now live as well as their descendants. We hope that our presence and work honor these caretakers.

We further recognize that there are no federally- or state-recognized native tribes within Pennsylvania. This is due to centuries of violence, genocide, disease and forced removal as well as the history of residential schools. We acknowledge the painful history of the first government-run boarding school for Native American children, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which was housed 80 miles from Lewisburg, and where nearly 200 children lost their lives and more than 10,000 children from 140 tribes were subjected to cultural genocide.

We recognize that acknowledgements precede action. The purpose of land acknowledgements is to create broader public awareness of the true history of the land, begin to repair relationships with Native American communities and with the land, and inspire ongoing action and relations. Land acknowledgements also support larger reconciliation efforts, remind people that colonization is ongoing and that Native American lands are currently occupied by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and reverently and respectfully engage with these histories and their legacies.