Some acknowledgements*, qua studying history at Duke:

Duke University sits on ancestral lands of the Eno and Occaneechi people who came to be affiliated within the Saponi Nation, as well as the Tuscarora Nation. These lands are home to present-day Native life and sovereignty: North Carolina’s eight state-recognized Native tribes, urban Native organizations such as the Triangle Native American Society, and Duke’s own Native American Student Alliance. Duke, an institution with a mission to “help those who suffer, cure disease, and promote health,” was financed historically by the proceeds of tobacco and electrical power generation, and is thus among the beneficiaries of products that also caused great harm to the health of humans and environments. Some of Duke’s most prominent past patrons and leaders perpetuated exclusion, exploitation, and silencing of Black people, as did the long-segregated University itself. At the same time, Black students, faculty, staff and other contributors are and have long been pivotal contributors to the university and its institutional evolution, including leadership in a present “journey to dismantle behaviors, practices, policies and institutions forged out of white supremacy.” (1) None of these facts are unique to Duke. Yet for members of the Duke community, our collective relationship to them is. The same goes for further facts we may seek out regarding Duke’s history and other histories lived before, beyond, within, alongside, and despite it, and their legacies at present-day Duke. Further, we’re a disparate “we,” each with our own individual and community histories we may wish to acknowledge and explore, histories inflecting our relationships to Duke’s history and to each other.

What do we want to do about it? What does it mean to be responsible to these histories? As historians (we’re all historians, like it or not), we can make the study of history a stepping-stone toward an affirmative kind of responsibility, neither just a roster of blame for unjust harms and undeserved benefits, nor just a realist acquiescence to their inevitability seeking the most efficient means to discharge, erase, and forget such debts. As we tell histories, we might not only to learn and acknowledge historical relations between lands, waters, materials, and peoples, but also to make this a starting point for fashioning affirmative individual and collective responsibilities for ourselves based on these histories, and figuring out how to act on them.

(1) The Hurston-James Society, “Juneteenth: An Open Letter to Duke,” The Chronicle, 18 June 2020, https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2020/06/juneteenth-an-open-letter-to-duke.

* These acknowledgements, a work in progress, draw on text and links generously shared by Prof. Juliana Barr and draw inspiration from the letter cited above and Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “Beyond Land Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions,” Social Text 39, no. 1 (146) (March 1, 2021): 21–46.