The University of Tulsa has received $500,000 from the Mellon Foundation to build a three-year research, teaching, and public humanities initiative titled “Sovereignty and Democracy in Indian Country.” The project will collaboratively engage the flourishing cultures of democracy that have emerged in Oklahoma at the complex intersection of state, federal, and tribal sovereignties.
“Tulsa is now the largest city in the nation on sovereign Indigenous land, and Oklahoma has once again become a crucible for democratic experimentation,” said principal investigator Sean Latham, director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at UTulsa and the Pauline McFarlin Walter Chair in English & Comparative Literature. “This transformative three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation allows us to engage this unique cultural geography by building an inclusive research network. We’ll bring together artists, historians, and leaders from within and beyond the Native nations to develop new histories of democracy on the American continent in order to better understand our shared past then imagine a thriving future for us all.”
Fully engaging the challenges raised by the 2020 Supreme Court decision McGirt v. Oklahoma requires a multidisciplinary approach to the question Ned Blackhawk poses in “The Rediscovery of America,” which is “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” UTulsa’s Oklahoma Center for the Humanities will use that decision as a catalyst to re-examine the relationship between the United States and Native nations in Oklahoma.
Each year, the Tulsa-based initiative will include a research seminar, an original traveling exhibition, and a national summit. These efforts will be broadly multidisciplinary and aim to reimagine the history of democracy in the Americas, think critically about the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, and imagine resilient, inclusive cultures of democracy.
The University of Tulsa is uniquely positioned at the intersection of three sovereign tribes and its President Brad Carson, a Cherokee citizen, has supported efforts to explore the institution’s own complicated history. Currently, a multiyear research effort is underway to explore the college’s initial founding as the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls and to recover the stories of those first students.
“Tulsa has a complex history, with layers of settlement, resettlement, and violence,” Carson said. “For more than a decade, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at The University of Tulsa has sought to explore those layers through research, lectures, exhibitions, symposia, performances, and discussions. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting this project, which will continue to ask questions and seek answers about the human condition.”
UTulsa was one of 30 universities – including MIT, Pitt, Northeastern, and Boston University – to receive a portion of $14 million in grants awarded last month by the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities.
Announced in 2023, the open call, spearheaded by Mellon’s Higher Learning program area, is part of the Foundation’s ongoing efforts to further democratize access to humanities funding. The call invited proposals from higher education institutions from across the country to submit proposals for research and curricular projects focused on any of three distinct categories: Cultures of U.S. Democracy, Environmental Justice Studies, and Social Justice and Disciplinary Knowledge.
“We at Mellon know that the significance of the humanities is not merely academic. We also know that humanities scholars at institutions across the country are doing phenomenal work that is making a real impact in the areas targeted by our call,” said Phillip Brian Harper, program director for Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation. “Our objective with this call was to identify and support some of the strongest instances of that work, and the incredibly high quality of the selected grantees shows that we succeeded spectacularly.”