Indigenous Studies Working Group

Trinity College is located just west of the Connecticut River, within Wangunk homelands. The river valley has sustained countless generations of Wangunk people. In the present, Hartford’s diverse Indigenous community includes Native people from across the continent and the globe. We express our commitment to supporting Native sovereignty and to recognizing and celebrating the Indigenous communities of Connecticut, New England, and beyond.

In 2017, faculty members at Trinity College founded the Indigenous Studies Working Group (ISWG), which supports research and teaching in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) on campus. The ISWG is committed to fostering responsible NAIS scholarship and community engagement and to supporting Native and non-Native students in the shared work of decolonizing the spaces where we live and learn.

For the first three years (2017-2020), the group met regularly in person each semester to discuss a work of NAIS scholarship, followed by an author visit. In recent years, ISWG work has been more ad hoc and virtual, often supporting events driven by students and faculty across campus.

From 2022 to 2024, some ISWG participants have served on Trinity’s Land Acknowledgment Committee, which consists of four faculty members, four students, four staff members, and one alumnus and Hartford resident. That committee developed a land acknowledgment statement and laid the groundwork for an ongoing process ensuring that the statement is accompanied by commitments to Trinity’s Indigenous community as well as the broader Indigenous community of Hartford and beyond. A call for participation in a college-wide steering committee is expected from the president’s office by early 2025.

To share and/or collaborate on upcoming events, we welcome interested students, professors, or community members to contact  [email protected] or [email protected].