Indigenous Heritage Month

Join us in celebrating Indigenous Heritage 2025. Sponsored by the Office of Community and Belonging, Zowie Banteah Cultural Center in collaboration with many department and student organization campus partners, this year’s theme, Sovereignty of the Self challenges us to ask questions such as: Who decides what is “Indigenous” enough? And why should we accept the limits they create?

Sovereignty has long been our most precious resource, protecting Indigeneity from the systems of violence and domination that sought to erase and replace it. This Indigenous Heritage Month, we build living and embodied knowledge of what it means to be sovereign, starting with our most intimate battlefield: the Self. We cherish the sovereignty found in acts of Indigenous Creation. We show critical love to the institutions that have sustained us by challenging and elevating them. We hold, unflinchingly, the historic and material realities that make us, including and especially the hard truths that haunt those who choose complicity over courage.

We do this all in service of becoming worthy collaborators. Shedding attempts to impose definitions and borders on us, we are guided and understood by our shared dignity as First Peoples. This month, we let go of the colonial notion of becoming worthy enough to enter rooms and instead dedicate our energy to creating rooms worthy of all those who enter. We do this all for you.