Hello! I am Savanna Cunningham, it’s my third year here at Knox. I am a deeply spiritual person and am the president of Pagan Club and I love to read and write poetry! I have had a fair amount of experience lately and in my past of learning about indigenous history. Throughout my life my family and especially me and my sibling have always been interested in native lifeways and culture. Albeit not always in the most respectful ways as I have come to understand. We have spent many hours discussing this history and how the land we live on was cared for in the past. In the past year I have also spent time looking more closely at modern native experiences and more critically examining the historical narratives we create about native people. This began in a way last winter term when I took environmental lit. In that class we discussed the fantastic book The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. This book speaks on the experiences of modern indigenous people in America among many many other topics. Ultimately this book is what got me interested again in studying native history in America. Parts of this book hone in on the violence perpetrated on native people, native community building and exiting that community, and native identity. After this class and reading this book I took the precursor to this class Indigenous and Native American History Before 1871 in spring 2024. That class taught me so much about the relationship between the emerging United States and the native communities on this land. Over the summer I took the intensive study of Indigenous Identity and Representation which was perhaps the most enlightening course I have ever taken. It made me realize and recontextualize so many of my own and our cultures’ narratives. I have become so much more knowledgeable and passionate about decolonization and especially the decolonization of our thoughts. I wrote about this idea in more detail over the summer when our class created a story map that I will link here https://arcg.is/1iLGP81.