Wai Allen
Early geologic research directly influenced land dispossession and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples in North America. Geologists were tasked with determining “land value” by identifying and evaluating natural resources, and in the United States their findings drove industrial development and westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from ancestral lands to areas deemed “less valuable,” shaping the boundaries of many American Indian reservations. As industrialization progressed and new valuable resources (e.g., petroleum) were discovered, reservation boundaries were repeatedly redrawn to exclude them. This multigenerational process of land loss has contributed to longstanding distrust of the geoscience community amongst Indigenous communities. Today, the geosciences still struggle to attract and retain a diverse workforce, particularly Indigenous geoscientists. The geoscience discipline broadly aims to study the Earth and its natural processes. Geologic data collected for this purpose—including maps, rock samples, and fossils—have often been taken from Indigenous lands without consent prior to the late 20th century self-determination era. Museums, geological surveys, and university researchers continue to benefit from these collections. Institutions that steward these archives hold a responsibility to recognize when their collections reflect Indigenous data and to address their histories. This presentation examines the geologic research footprint of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University within Indigenous communities. The goal of this work is to initiate reconciliation efforts by identifying and repatriating geologic samples back to Indigenous communities and by supporting the development of data protocols that enable Indigenous self-determination.