The month of November is National American Indian Heritage Month, which was designed in 1990 to commemorate the nation's indigenous heritage. At Middlebury, students who celebrated the Indigenous community last month have said that their visibility on campus and their ability to maintain an organized community remains an ongoing struggle.
A group of students first founded the Voices of Indigenous People (VIP) club in 2006, but there has been a sharp decrease in the number of enrolled Native American students since the 2010–2011 academic year. From 2008 to 2023, VIP was inactive, but in 2023, Nadia Hare ’25 had the idea to revive the club. In an interview with The Campus, Hare described recognizing the importance of creating a casual space to connect with those from similar backgrounds.
“Initially I really just wanted a super chill space, to get together with some friends and just hang out. That was my vibe and that was the only capacity I had,” Hare said.
Since then, the club has grown in size and its offerings on campus for students with Indigenous backgrounds, according to Emma Wilson ’27, the current president of VIP.
“The event that went on the best this year was our Indigenous People’s Day movie share. We watched There’s Something in the Water, and we had faculty and students come. We got to hit some hard stuff, and also just be together,” Wilson said.
Despite the club’s successful revival last year, it continues to face challenges, according to Wilson, who spoke to the lack of Indigenous representation and community spaces on campus.
“We try to make it half affinity and half activism based. We’re really just trying to provide a space for any indigenous affiliating students on campus,” Wilson said. “We’re open to whoever is interested in Indigenous justice.”
Middlebury’s indigenous community remains a small portion of the student body. According to the 2024–2025 Common Data Set, which uses federal reporting guidelines for identity rather than self-reporting, there is only one currently enrolled student who identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native, and none identify as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. Last year’s Zeitgeist survey found that seven students self-identified as the former category, and six in the latter.
Several liberal arts colleges have seen continual discussions and efforts to better educate and celebrate Indigenous history and to explore ways to build respectful relationships between Indigenous-identifying populations and people who call these Native lands home today, and Middebury is no exception. Last spring, Dartmouth College hosted the Ivy Native Council Conference, which welcomed student representatives from all eight Ivy League colleges and Middlebury.
“I’d say that because we’re still at risk of going dormant again because of the lack of Native American Students on campus. We’re working with admissions, and they’ve gone to schools all around the country [saying] ‘Why don’t you choose Middlebury?’ And they [prospective students] always say, ‘There’s no Indigenous Studies Department’,” Wilson said.
An Action Plan for Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion passed by Middlebury College in 2020 detailed goals “to recruit, hire, mentor and retain faculty and staff from Black, Indigenous, people of color, and historically underrepresented groups.” However, according to Wilson, the college has not made visible progress towards recruiting faculty members with indigenous backgrounds.
Wilson explained that VIP has been working with the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (OIDEI) on the possibility of creating an academic cluster dedicated to Indigenous Studies.
“The idea is to have professors who have expertise in the field and are interested in teaching to offer classes. It’s not like an Indigenous Studies department, but it would be as close as we can get to that,” she said.
Despite recent successful events, Hare believes there are still funding barriers to improving the well-being of Indigenous students on campus.
“A challenge is definitely the continued under-investment in Native American students. I feel this goes for students of color in general. I think a lot of our services just get clumped into one that the AFC has to take care of, or it usually relies on student organizations to uphold traditions,” she said.
Hare has also been using her capacity as a climate action fellow to support VIP financially in planning for events. She feels that their collaboration with the Vermont Releaf Collective to host a discussion panel has been especially rewarding.
“We just talked for an hour about what it meant to be Indigenous and share our own personal stories. The premise was so simple, but it also was groundbreaking, because it literally is so hard to just talk, see older people and have someone to look up to,” Hare said.
Wilson told The Campus that she and other club members look forward to planning more joint events and collaborations with other existing student organizations such as West Asian and North African Students (WANAS), Middlebury Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Middlebury Women of Color (WOC). Their short-term vision is focused on further publicizing the existence of VIP.
“Right now what we’re trying to do is have more fun events to just get people interested and excited to start building a community. We need people to come and get the word out there,” Wilson said.
Hare told The Campus that the Indigenous Justice Coalition (IJC) has also been a source of affirmation and inspiration. IJC was formed after Daniel Silva, associate professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, wrote an op-ed for The Campus in December 2021 calling for the college to take further steps to address its complicity in the colonial past. Associate Laboratory Professor and College Lands Conservationist Marc Lapin — a member of the land acknowledgment board — reached out to him about the idea of IJC, envisioning students, staff and faculty mobilizing to support Indigenous land justice.
“We gathered a lot of momentum in terms of mobilizing across campus, with the size of the group growing consistently and exponentially over the course of the last few years,” Silva wrote in an email to The Campus.
While part of the goal is the establishment of an Indigenous Studies Department, Silva also emphasized the importance of addressing land dispossession of local Indigenous people.
“Another goal has been to push the college to redistribute a significant portion of its land holdings in Vermont to Western Abenaki communities; land holdings that were unceded by, yet dispossessed from, Indigenous people, and for whom land is a living space that one lives with rather than as a piece of property,” Silva wrote.
Hare has participated in IJC since her sophomore year, which she said has formed an essential body to discuss Indigenous life on campus.
“I was really glad that this group existed. It just showed that people cared, and people were talking about it even though it wasn’t leading to action steps at the time. It was just great to meet those faculty and staff and to have someone to lean on,” Hare added.
Although Silva believes that the barriers to initiating desired changes are deeply rooted, he shared that grassroots movements like IJC will continue to work toward their goals.
“The struggle for indigenous sovereignty and against settler colonialism is a continuous one, and I feel fortunate to be in community with many colleagues and students that are invested in that struggle and many related ones,” he wrote.
Caroline (Xiaoyuan) Jiao (she/her) is a News Editor.
Caroline was previously a contributing writer for The Campus. She spent the summer of 2024 interning as a news reporter at the Addison Independent, covering local county events. She also worked as a Narrative Journalism Fellow during the 2023-2024 academic year, making podcasts from student interviews.
Caroline is a Literary Studies major. She calls Beijing, China home, and she enjoys the tight-knit community of the town of Middlebury. One can often find her in proximity to the knoll or cooking with friends, and she takes pride in a Chinese-language literary magazine she and her friends are running.
