The Settler Campus

Year   2024
Team   Andrew Herscher
       Megan Kortenhof
       Vanessa Lekaj    

The Settler Campus is a research project undertaken in the seminar, “Under the Campus, the Land.” This seminar was taught in Fall 2024 at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College and Urban Planning by Andrew Herscher, with four guest lectures by Eric Hemenway, Director of the Department of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. The Settler Campus explores the relationship of the University of Michigan to the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands in what became the state of Michigan. The project focuses on the decision to locate the university in the newly-founded Ann Arbor in 1837. How was this decision shaped by the logics of settler colonialism? Engaging this question, The Settler Campus attempts to open larger discussions on the university of Michigan’s Native and colonial pasts and presents.