This article is the third in a series about the University’s land acknowledgment commitments.
In 1636, when Roger Williams established Providence Plantations, he bought the land from the Narragansett Indian Tribe. Unlike many other colonists of his time, Williams acknowledged that New World land was not unoccupied or simply up for grabs. He aimed to establish trust with the indigenous community. But as more settlers arrived in Rhode Island, conflicts began to erupt between the colonists and the tribe.
More than a century later, in 1770, Brown University settled in Providence, the historic homelands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.
“I don’t think it’s any secret that Brown doesn’t have a good relationship with the Indigenous community, specifically the Narragansett,” Mack Scott, assistant professor of Critical Native American and Indigenous studies and an enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, told The Herald. This is not only due to “historical harms,” but also recent University actions that have been viewed negatively by the Narragansett Indian Tribe, he said.
In 2021, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 charged a working group with creating recommendations for a land acknowledgement and subsequent commitments to strengthening the University’s relationship with Indigenous peoples. Faculty and staff shared in interviews with The Herald that several controversies have inhibited progress toward the commitments.
The Herald dove into the archives to understand the history that has influenced Brown’s institutional relationship with the Narragansett Indian Tribe and other local Indigenous communities.
How student activism created institutional change
In 2016, Brown reached national headlines when it changed the fall holiday designated “Columbus Day” to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
This change was preceded by campus activism that began years prior; in 2008, students and faculty staged a speak-out focused on protesting the Columbus Day holiday. In 2009, the University renamed it “Fall Weekend.”
In October 2015, Natives at Brown organized a demonstration demanding Fall Weekend be renamed Indigenous People’s Day. More than 300 students and Indigenous community members attended the protest, which involved performances of traditional songs and dances, speeches by citizens of local tribes and a campus march.
Jeamilett Martinez ’28, co-coordinator for NAB told The Herald she thanks student activism for many of the resources she has as a Native student on campus.
“A lot of the things that I benefit from — like having (the House of Ninnoug), being able to study (Native American and Indigenous Studies), having a DUG and having Indigenous professors and mentors — have been because of student activism,” Martinez said.
In the fall of 2015, before the protest that led to Brown changing Fall Weekend to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” a since-removed op-ed published in The Herald suggested that Native students should celebrate the benefits of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Students and faculty responded by meeting with Paxson to urge institutional commitment to research and teaching on Native American and Indigenous peoples. This student push helped spur the creation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and CNAIS, The Herald previously reported.
NAISI was founded in spring 2016, and CNAIS launched in spring 2023.
endawnis Spears, practitioner in residence for tribal engagement at the Swearer Center, said that “the roots of the land acknowledgement and the subsequent five commitments” are from student activism. “None of this would be here without their decision to highlight the need for some institutional changes at Brown,” she said.
How a professor’s false claims hurt institutional reliability
Elizabeth Hoover PhD’10 worked as an associate professor of American Studies at Brown and served as the faculty chair of NAISI from 2019 until her departure from the University. Shortly after, she was revealed to be non-Native despite previous Indigenous claims.
In 2023, Hoover issued a public apology admitting she is white, claiming she was unaware her family’s Indigenous claims were untrue.
Javin Felipe ’26, a former senior advisor for NAB, said the incident “earned Brown a reputation.” When he attends Native conferences and introduces himself as a Brown student, “that’s kind of the first thing that pops into their head.”
“Not many people realize how big of a scandal this was (among) Native scholars, or not even just Native academia, but the Native communities across the country,” he added.
Indigenous identity fraud — in which an individual falsely claims Indigenous heritage — has occurred at universities in both the United States and Canada. It’s “not uncommon,” Felipe said. “But it’s sad that this happened at Brown and was allowed to happen at Brown.”
How the University ‘mishandled’ one of the first land transfers
In 2017, members and supporters of the Pokanoket tribe pushed for the University to return land in Bristol, staging a campus march and an encampment that lasted over a month. For a time, negotiations stalled due to disagreement over various tribal claims to the land, The Herald previously reported.
In a community-wide email response, the Steering Committee of NAISI wrote that the Pokanoket Nation “is not recognized by the other federally recognized Wampanoag communities.”
Eventually, Brown reached an agreement with the Pokanoket Nation in which the University pledged to put a portion of the land in a preservation trust. According to the agreement, the trust intended to be accessible to the Pokanoket Nation, as well as other tribes with historical claims to the land, The Herald previously reported.
In 2024, Brown transferred 255 acres of the Mount Hope property to a preservation trust established by the Pokanoket tribe. The remaining 120 acres were to be sold to the Town of Bristol.
According to the announcement, the deed for the land transfer states that the Pokanoket shall “provide and maintain access to the lands and waters of the Property to all members of all Tribes historically part of the Pokanoket Nation/Confederacy,” in addition to various bands and tribes within the Wampanoag nation.
Scott said the land transfer from the Mount Hope property has negatively impacted Brown’s relationship with the Narragansett Indian tribe. “To have one of the first ever instances of an institution doing this land back effort in providing land to a Native community that the Narragansett are saying are non‑Native is a real big slap in the face,” Scott said.
Students at NAB have also criticized the land transfer, saying the University “mishandled” the transfer, The Herald previously reported.
In an email to The Herald, University spokesperson Brian Clark wrote that “Brown made considerable effort to directly engage interested parties in the future of the Mount Hope property” and stated that the Narragansett Indian Tribe declined to participate in the process.
How the University has recorded Indigenous history
When the University was given Rhode Island industrialist Rudolf Haffenreffer’s collections, there were over 60,000 artifacts from Native American tribes. According to the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology website, Haffenreffer owned land at Mount Hope in Bristol, the location of King Philip’s War, an armed conflict between New England colonists and Native Americans. Haffenreffer began collecting Native American artifacts from New England and built the museum to house his collection.
After Haffenreffer’s death, his family donated the museum — including the majority of its collections — as well as a portion of the land to Brown in 1955.
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires institutions to return Native American human remains and cultural items discovered on federal or tribal lands to the Indigenous communities they originated from.
At that time, the Haffenreffer Museum possessed artifacts that fell under NAGPRA’s scope. Haffenreffer sent out nearly 1,000 letters to notify tribal communities that originally owned these items. But the museum is still working to return these items to Indigenous communities, according to Robert Preucel, a professor of anthropology and director of the Haffenreffer Museum.
The Haffenreffer Museum’s possession of these items has sparked controversy between the Narragansett Indian Tribe and the University over the years, according to Scott.
In 1999, The Herald reported that the Tribal Historical Preservation Officer for the Narragansett Indian Tribe claimed that officials at the Haffenreffer Museum were not honest in their handling of Native American artifacts known as the Burr’s Hill collection. They claimed that the Haffenreffer Museum had misattributed the collection to the Wampanoag tribe.
More recently, in 2023, Narragansett officials said the Haffenreffer Museum failed to adequately consult the Narragansett Indian Tribe about the museum’s possession of 10 human remains and 24 funerary objects associated with the Narragansett.
“NAGPRA is an important issue because it is not just a matter of physically returning ancestors,” Spears said. “It also is a legal process. It is an intellectual process. And for tribal nations that are looking to receive their ancestors back, it is a spiritual process.”
In an email to The Herald, Preucel wrote that the University administration has “funded a dedicated museum staff position for repatriation and provenance” and hired an external organization, Bernstein & Associates, as NAGPRA consultants for the museum. Preucel was a member of the working group that established the land acknowledgment statement and serves on the NAISI steering committee.
He added that the museum is hoping to build partnerships with tribes and collaborate with them to create educational programs.
How the University moves forward
Scott said that recent controversies — including NAGPRA disputes and the Bristol land transfer — have caused a “rift” between Brown and the Narragansett Indian Tribe that has inhibited community-engaged work.
The controversy of the land transfer “is definitely influencing our ability to live into the five commitments,” Spears said.
According to Scott, there were efforts for some professors to create community-engaged courses with local tribal communities, but due to “the tradition of animosities” those courses were not able to occur.
The 2026 status report acknowledges relational challenges, including “recent land claims and transfers” and “scholar identity appropriation.”
“These issues have impacted the University’s institutional relationships with regional tribal and Indigenous partners,” the report reads. “Building trust and strengthening these relationships are foundational to the work moving forward.”
Spears said that stronger trust between Indigenous communities and the University is necessary for Brown to effectively progress towards the commitments. “I think we are in a phase of building that trustworthiness right now,” she added.
Rachel Wicker is a senior staff writer covering affinity and identity. She is from Athens, Georgia and plans on concentrating in English on the nonfiction track and International and Public Affairs. Outside of writing, she enjoys reading books of any genre and doing yoga.
