Tufts Blogs

It’s Wednesday night, and I’ve just finished co-teaching my ExCollege course with my best friend, Vanessa. Despite having classes stacked all day, I’m not exhausted; I’m smiling and already thinking about next class. Wednesdays have quietly become my favorite day of the week, all because of what happens in that room at 6:30pm– the community we build, the conversations we have, and the stories we share. Stories that have long deserved a space to be heard.

Last fall, in my academic advisor’s course on Themes in Native American and Indigenous Studies, we were asked to design a syllabus for our own imagined NAIS course. As I sat with that assignment, my thoughts drifted first from the history of Indigenous organizing in the Dawnland and the Wampanoag land claims, then to the political movements surrounding them, and eventually, to my own family. I thought of my grandfather, Long Leaf. I remembered shucking corn with my brother on his deck, the sun dipping low over the lake behind his house. I thought of his hands, always stained with paint, capturing the lake’s shifting moods on canvas. Walking into his home meant stepping into the thick, familiar scent of acrylic paint that seemed to live in the walls themselves. His sunroom, bathed in soft light filtering through windows that framed the water, was always overflowing with canvases. His art. His art!

When I think about my grandfather, I think about art. But more specifically, I think about one piece that stops me every time, that being his charcoal portrait of Metacomet, King Philip, the Wampanoag leader who stood against the relentless spread of English colonies. Through those deep, deliberate strokes, my grandfather did more than depict a face; he preserved a story the way he knew it, which I see as one of many acts of resistance that resonate through our bloodline. With every shadow and line, he honored that legacy, capturing an ancestral memory with reverence and precision.

That portrait inspired the syllabus I created for class. The more I researched Indigenous artists, the more I began to understand that Indigenous art isn’t just about creating; it’s about making meaning from survival, beauty from struggle. These artists speak truths I’ve felt but never had the language for. Through symbolism, contrast, and disruption, they challenge settler expectations about what Indigenous expression is supposed to be. In our communities, art isn’t decoration. It’s storytelling, resistance, and a demand to be seen and heard.

That spring, Vanessa and I found ourselves deep in conversation about how exciting it would be to teach an ExCollege course at Tufts. It had been months since I’d submitted my Indigenous art syllabus, but as we talked, I thought about how often we’d finished each other’s thoughts; how naturally our ideas built on one another. Teaching together felt not only possible, but right. I already had a syllabus I was deeply passionate about, and Vanessa, as a Film minor, brought a sharp and thoughtful perspective that could expand the course in ways I hadn’t yet imagined. Neither of us felt fully ready to take on the role alone, but together? Together, we had the vision and balance to create something new: an interdisciplinary course that blended visual art and film in a way Tufts hadn’t seen before.

We began asking ourselves: Who else is teaching about the politics of Indigenous art? Who else is examining how our artists use expression as a path toward sovereignty? Our course became an exploration of survivance—that powerful word that holds both survival and resistance. We wanted our students to understand that every Indigenous brushstroke is a political act, every film frame a form of reclamation, every piece of art a declaration that we are still here.

It is now the fall semester of 2025, and I just stood before a room of first-year students who are not only brilliant but eager to understand how art functions within Indigenous communities, not just as expression, but as resistance, as memory, and as a demand to be seen. Our class is small, but I’ve come to cherish that. Teaching, I’ve realized, isn’t always about broadcasting to the masses, but can be forming a circle where every voice carries weight. I still don’t quite know what to call the first-years in the room. “Students” feels too formal, too hierarchical, when in reality, we’re all learning together. And I truly have learned something from each of them. A few have even joined the Indigenous Students' Organization, and watching them step into the same community that held me when I first met Vanessa— that’s one of the most deeply fulfilling, yet hard-to-put-into-words feelings I’ve experienced.

That first Wednesday, my hands trembled with nerves. But with Vanessa by my side and a room full of curious faces before me, I reminded myself that I don’t need to have all the answers. What matters is asking the right questions and creating space for truth to unfold on its own. 

We’ve just finished our first module, Art as Activism, where we delved into the work of Chiara “Sunshine” Beaumont, the Creative Resistance Team at the NDN Collective, and Tall Oak Weeden. Each class takes on a life of its own. Sometimes our discussions lead us down unexpected paths, like how even font choices carry political significance, especially in movements like LandBack. Sometimes the room grows quiet, heavy with the emotion a piece carries, as we reflect on how context breathes life into meaning.

The Marías play softly in the background as we create our own pieces, and laughter often breaks the quiet—usually sparked by Vanessa’s sudden giggle at something only she hears. It’s in these small moments, this beautiful mix of reflection and joy, that I’m reminded just how alive this work truly is. 

Three weeks in. Only three weeks, and I already know with absolute certainty that teaching is what I want to do. I keep searching for a better word than “teaching,” because in that room, it feels more like co-learning—facilitating discussions I’m eager to be part of. I want to engage in the field of Indigenous Studies to share knowledge, but also to nurture the kind of confidence in others that I spent years searching for. I want to be the faculty member who shares the history of resistance that young Indigenous students hunger for but so rarely find. Maybe I’ll even teach a course on Indigenous expression the way Vanessa and I do now, driven by the inspiration of our success in the class and the ever-evolving conversation about identity, resistance, and expression.

In that classroom, I think Vanessa and I are carrying forward a conversation that first reached me through my grandfather’s hands, flowed through his brushstrokes, and now lives on in the questions we ask and the art we create together. I can’t wait to see how our story continues to grow.