Igniting Pathways for Land-Based Healing: Possibilities for Institutional Accountability

Abstract

U.S. based post-secondary educational institutions usually have violent origin stories that include land theft, genocide, and the participation in slavery. Schools of social work are no exception. In recent years, colleges and universities, including schools of social work, have started to confront their histories of and participation in racial-settler colonialism. The severance of land as kinship, and land theft, have been a significant part of the harms of racial-settler colonialism. Colleges and universities have benefited from land theft, primarily through land-grants. Still, institutional accountability has been minimal, including limited acknowledgment of harm and modest changes in curriculum and staff. This paper expands the terrain of institutional accountability in social work higher education to consider land-based healing initiatives as a critical remedy for the harms of racial settler colonialism. This paper provides a historical review and decolonial analysis of the connection between social work higher education and land-grant institutions. Building on social cartography literature, a mapping framework for decolonizing higher education is examined in relation to questions of institutional accountability by land-grant universities. This framework is offered in conjunction with contemporary examples of struggles for institutional accountability in and outside of higher education. The paper concludes with future recommendations for research related to institutional accountability and the implications of land-based healing as an approach.

1. Introduction

We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning

—Sandra Cisneros (2004, p. xviii)

Ideologies of dominance at the root of racial-settler colonialism are embedded in all United States institutions. The term “racial-settler colonialism” is used in this paper to assert the connections between the colonial origins of the United States and the genocide and enslavement of racialized folx for the purposes of violent land seizures and capitalist profit. Decolonial scholarship, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory, and Queer Theory point to the different ways that white supremacy, patriarchy, cis heteronormativity and settler-capitalism have been systematically and structurally constructed and maintained into the present day (Cho et al. 2013; Lugones 2016; Milton 1997; Quijano 2000). Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins’s exploration of the matrix of dominance, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of intersectionality, as well as bell hooks and Audre Lorde’s scholarship around power dynamics, speak to the interlocking nature of these oppressive systems (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000; hooks 1994; Lorde 1984). Social work higher education schools and programs are not exempt from benefiting from these legacies nor innocent from direct complicity (Weaver et al. 2021). There is a tension between the ethical and regulatory obligations that social work education institutions have and their own entanglement with the violences of racial-settler colonialism (Del-Villar 2021; Stein 2018). This paper seeks to contribute to a nuanced, critical interrogation regarding the available possibilities for practices of accountability by social work higher education institutional entities as sites of coloniality.

A review of key federal legislation traces the explicit ways the United States government engaged in human rights violations in the construction of what is now the country’s system of public education (Dunbar-Ortiz 2019; United Nations (UN) General Assembly 2005). The Morrill Act of 1862 will be examined as a mechanism for colonial expansion (Lee et al. 2020). Although serving as portals for economic upward mobility through academic attainment for many, land-grant universities are tied to the intentional and profound harming of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island1 and those kidnapped and enslaved from Alkebu-Lan2. The impact of the harm inflicted through racial-settler colonialism is indisputably linked to the dire social conditions experienced globally by Black and Indigenous people as reflected through dismal outcomes across social determinants of health despite advances in technology and record levels of wealth observed in the 21st century (Amster 2022; United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Affairs n.d.).

Social work schools and programs (with a specific emphasis on those located within land-grant universities for the purposes of this paper) must reckon with their responsibility to this history in relation to the profession’s core values as articulated in the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics (National Association of Social Workers (NASW) 2021a; Weaver et al. 2021). As a profession that espouses social justice as a core value, social work is called to social and political action to eliminate “domination of, exploitation of, and discrimination against” any person or group (National Association of Social Workers (NASW) 2021a, Ethical Principle 6.04). Given (1) the way racism is embedded into the history of the United States and (2) social work’s location working explicitly with groups that experience oppression and marginalization, this social justice imperative calls for social work to interrogate its relationship to systems of oppression. An example of such professional identity reflexivity includes social work understanding its role in relationship to the carceral state and systems of social surveillance and punishment that pervade many modern public institutions (Bergen and Abji 2019; Kim 2020).

Moreover, accredited social work programs are expected to reflect the profession’s commitment to “anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion” (ADEI) in their explicit and implicit curriculum according to the most recent version of the Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) set forth by the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE) (2022). As such, ADEI requires social work students and, by extension, professional social workers to engage in the hard work of unraveling histories of collusion and of resistance by a profession that emerged at a time of widespread crimes against humanity by the US government and private entities (United Nations (UN) General Assembly 1948a, 1948b; Stein 2018). While the United States continues to grapple with its history of settler colonialism and systemic racism, institutions of social work education have an ethical obligation to be the beacon to light the complex pathways towards accountability and healing through acknowledging deeply rooted collusion with inhumane practices and meaningfully addressing past harms, disrupting current harm, and preventing future harm.

International experts on violations of human rights assert that reparations to victims and descendants of victims of colonialism and slavery are the obligation and responsibility of the State (United Nations (UN) Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner 2019), thus establishing a relationship of accountability between institutional powers and communities. It would follow that government-funded institutions directly tied to or benefiting from colonialism and slavery, such as land-grant universities, would also be responsible for interrogating their obligations to the victims and descendants of those harmed. Across universities, the increased presence of anti-racist and decolonizing discourse has also opened the door for questions of institutional accountability beyond symbolism, metaphors and acknowledgments (Hannah-Jones 2020; Coates 2014; Tuck and Yang 2012). This paper complicates calls for institutional accountability through the lens of land-based healing as a decolonial paradigm shift that centers non-Western ways of knowing and being in addressing colonial harm.

This paper will focus on a historical review and decolonial analysis of the connection between social work higher education and land-grant institutions. de Oliveira Andreotti et al.’s (2015) mapping framework for decolonizing higher education is examined in relation to questions of institutional accountability by land-grant universities. This is the first time, to the authors’ knowledge, that this framework is applied from the perspective of social work education and is a timely contribution to the literature on decolonizing social work.

The analysis is situated within a United States context as well as a global backdrop framed by international humanitarian law. As such, we recognize that this paper is bound by certain Western academic standards of knowledge as defined by the dominating perspective of the Global North. In the tradition of radical educators and activist scholars, we interweave publicly accessible poetry by Franny Choi (Button Poetry 2016) and the above quote from activist scholar Sandra Cisneros (2004) as a way to characterize easily over-intellectualized concepts of whiteness, harm, and accountability through the use of popular literature and media (Freire [1970] 2000; Rodriguez 2018). Our hope is to reach a wider audience than what has historically been reserved for those included in the circles of academia. We are intentional about being irreverent and interrupting the reader’s sense of comfort with emotionally sanitized scholarship. Our goal is to ignite and activate a sense of urgency around land-based healing within and beyond the academy’s walls. We are divorcing ourselves from respectability politics in resistance to systems that have historically disrespected us, our forms of being and knowing.

The authors’ collective perspectives include that of US-born settlers, immigrant settlers from mixed indigenous backgrounds and descendants from enslaved Africans now residing in the US. We received professional training and formal education from public and private predominantly white institutions of higher education. The authors sought to draw from scholarship by indigenous scholars and elevate non-Western perspectives from within and outside social work academia. This paper is an extension of our own personal, relational and sociopolitically intertwined commitment to engaging with our relationship to racial-settler colonialism as both benefactors and survivors. Posing this paper as an invitation for further dialogue and action, we aim to navigate our multifaceted roles within, around, and outside institutions of higher education with integrity, grace and accountability.

• Whiteness walks into a bar
• And orders a scotch on the rocks
• The bartender is like: Anything else?
• Whiteness is like,
• Oh, can I get all your resources, political autonomy, and sense of self-worth?
• The bartender is like, umm
• Do you wanna start a tab?

2. Historical Review of Harm

According to contemporary human rights standards set by the UN Convention on Genocide (United Nations (UN) General Assembly 1948a), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations (UN) General Assembly 1948b), and other international core humanitarian law treaties, the United States government is responsible for numerous and some of the most heinous violations of human rights, including genocide through the targetted extermination of indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and the kidnapping and enslavement (for intended perpetuity) of indigenous peoples from Alkebu-Lan. As such, European colonial power emerged via a matrix of domination through which whiteness, a racial social-construct situating white, cismale, Christian Europeans as the pinnacle of humanity, continues to be privileged through structural, institutional, ideological, and interpersonal interlocking hierarchies of oppression (Collins 2009; Cho et al. 2013; Quijano 2000).

Damaged-centered research (Tuck 2009) has prioritized the effects on communities from intergenerational violence of oppression, generating ample evidence regarding the human costs of poverty, gender violence, child abuse, and health and education disparities. Social policy initiatives aiming to ameliorate such conditions are seldom presented as a righteous redress for direct harms enacted by those in power but, rather, are most often the result of mass advocacy efforts and are wrapped in narratives of resilient, welfare-deserving individuals. The literature on the effects of war violence, natural disasters and conditions of intergenerational trauma point to the ways populations who are survivors of human rights violations are impacted across generations, at physiological, psycho-emotional, spiritual, interpersonal, familial, communal, cultural, economic and socio-political levels (United Nations (UN) General Assembly 2005).

As part of a larger discourse on the potentials and limitations of institutional accountability, this paper asserts that institutions of higher education are undeniably responsible for reparative actions for their connections to human rights violations inherent in the enactment of racial-settler colonial violence, past and present. In exposing the racial-settler colonial ties between US government policies and higher education, we charge social work higher education with genocide (Mayorga et al. 2019; The TRUTH Project 2023).3

2.1. Imperial Truth-Telling?

At a federal level, it is only recently that the US executive branch has reflected some efforts at acknowledging the State’s role in racial-settler colonial violence, often failing to move beyond that initial step toward reparations. For example, in President Biden’s proclamation of Indigenous People’s Day (11 October 2021), the references made to the “centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal nations throughout our country” leaves out who was doing the terrorizing and asserts that the “campaign of violence” is somehow over (Biden 2021). On 20 August 2022, approximately a year after his declaration of Juneteenth as a national holiday, President Biden referred to the system of slavery as “America’s original sin” (Biden 2022). In the same sentence, the statement calls for reflection on the “terrible toll of slavery” and on the “nation’s profound ability to heal and emerge stronger”. However, a glance at the persistent incidences of hate crimes and the ongoing, pervasive effects of systemic, anti-black racism stand in defiance of the alleged profound national healing (Lieberman 2023). Absent from these statements is a language of justice, reparations and accountability. The government continues to fall short of effectively promoting the protection and promotion of human rights for its most targeted populations. Universities are uniquely positioned to engage in research, knowledge generation and education oriented towards institutional accountability, leveraging its central role in a democratic society. As part of this work, institutions of higher education must reckon with inward-facing questions of accountability within the context of colonial violence.

2.2. The Land-Grant University—A Legacy of Racial-Settler Colonialism

The United States educational system, including its network of public and private post-secondary institutions, is often regarded as the crown jewel of American social progress and authority. Like most crown jewels, it is one that was obtained through oppression, violence, and dispossession. Established by European colonizers in the 1600s, the US system of higher education is one of the oldest sets of institutions erected in what came to be known as the United States of America. Indeed, schools (at all levels of education) became deeply implicated in the economic, social, legal and political foundations of an imperialist power through their influence on industrial technologies, professional training, fields of scientific study, and spaces for hegemonic Western academic discourse and thought:

…the colleges and universities often romanticized as the most prestigious in the U.S. and Europe were materially dependent upon the dispossession and exploitation of Black and Native American peoples’ labor and land while concomitantly authorizing the very knowledge formations through which such actions were rationalized.

(Boggs et al. 2019, n.p.)

State-sanctioned and enforced racial segregation in the education system continued into the 1950s, ensuring separate and unequal conditions and privileging white learners across class status. However, the white supremacist gatekeeping of education can be traced back to the colonial institutionalization of chattel slavery. Anti-literacy laws enforced by colonies, and later states, were one of the mechanisms through which access to education was prohibited to enslaved and most free Black people. Access, however, presented an insidious type of harm to Black and Indigenous people once granted entry into K-12 schooling and higher education. Records from proceedings at an educational conference during the Reconstruction era reveal the deliberate use of education as a method for moral-industrial indoctrination meant to produce laborers and part of the government’s genocide strategy aimed at the occupation of Indigenous territories (Fong 2019).

The creation of the Indian industrial Boarding School network is intertwined with the establishment of schools for freed Black people. The funding awarded to Captain Pratt (credited with the phrase “kill the Indian, save the man”) for the Carlisle Institute in Pennsylvania was based on the “successful” experiment of “enrolling” Indigenous prisoners into the Hampton School for freed Black people (Fong 2019).

Many universities and colleges founded prior to the Civil War were built on unceded, dispossessed indigenous lands and directly benefited from the forced labor of displanted and enslaved African peoples and their descendants. Once education became commodified in the nascent United States, post-secondary institutions became a driving technology of settler colonialism.

The founding, financing, and development of higher education in the colonies were thoroughly intertwined with the economic and social forces that transformed West and Central Africa through the slave trade and devastated indigenous nations in the Americas. The academy was a beneficiary and defender of these processes.

(Wilder 2013, p. 6)

The invasion of land and its subsequent transformation into property through violence, alienation, enslavement, and genocide of Indigenous and African peoples is justified and rationalized by the academy (Mayorga et al. 2019) and the leaders passing through these institutions. In this way, universities serve to transmit the ideologies of white supremacy.

• Two
• Whiteness walks into a bar and orders an IPA
• He gets his drink and then he just starts wrecking shit.
• He is smashing all the liquor bottles.
• He pours the wine out onto the floor.
• He unhooks all of the kegs
• Except, for the IPA that he has just ordered.
• So eventually, everyone starts to order that too
• Since everything else is ruined.
• Whiteness sits back on his stool,
• takes a sip of his drink and says,
• Why is everyone always copying me?

Land-Grab Policies

Political leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, supported policies that were efforts in the consolidation and conservation of the Union’s burgeoning economic power. According to Dunbar-Ortiz (2019), Congress, at Lincoln’s behest, passed the Morrill and the Homestead Acts of 1862 during the Civil War. With the Homestead Act, Congress gave 160 acres of federal land to adult persons who agreed to farm the land (Homestead Act 1862). The Morrill Act of 1862 provided states with thousands of stolen acres of unceded indigenous lands (i.e., land-grants) in exchange for their abandonment of slave-holding status (Morrill Act 1862). Each US representative and senator was provided with access to 30,000 acres of “land-grabbed” territory (a total of nearly 11 million acres), sometimes geographically located outside of their state lines (Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues and Native American Student Development 2021; Lee et al. 2020). States, in turn, were required to use the land-grants to either sell, build on or contribute towards the maintenance of colleges for agriculture, mechanical arts and military training (National Education Association 2022).

The Morrill Act and similar policies valorized the intellectual labor of white males who formerly benefitted from slave labor while contributing to the cultural genocide and educational disenfranchisement of Indigenous communities and formerly enslaved African people (Dunbar-Ortiz 2019). The Morrill Act demonstrates the power of the colonial imagination: “without the ability to intensify production under the coercive power of the lash, the notion of scientific agriculture promised to assuage the anxiety about lost agricultural productivity through the promise of the enhanced value of applied intellectual labor” (Boggs et al. 2019). The Morrill Act became a strategy for power consolidation. By providing states with a reward or reparations in the form of land for abandoning their slave-holding status, the Union advanced its capitalist imperative of resource accumulation (Lee et al. 2020). Policies like the Morrill Act and the Homestead Act solidified settlers’ position as a dominating force in the West.

As of 2022, there were 105 public land-grant universities and seven private institutions (National Education Association 2022). Land-grant universities have caused harm and/or benefited from harm to people and the land. They are deeply implicated in the development of military technology towards environmentally devastating imperialist ends. Universities have engaged in profit-driven research in health and social sciences that has cemented the power of corporations responsible for much of the toxic and extractive practices behind the climate crisis (Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues and Native American Student Development 2021). They have invaded communities of color and displaced residents with the ensuing gentrification (Lee et al. 2020). Although land-grants are mostly associated with agricultural science, the proliferation of social work (BSW and MSW) programs means that, increasingly, social work education finds a home at land-grant institutions. Thus, there are contemporary and historical ties between social work (education, profession, and institutions) and land-grant institutions.

2.3. Colonial Entanglements: Social Work and Social Work Education

At the intersection of human services and education systems, social work higher education is irrefutably tied to the history and legacy of racial-settler colonialism. Acknowledging that the foundation of the social work profession was built on white supremacist traditions and policies of exclusion and domination is an important step in guiding social work’s commitment to social justice (Jones et al. 2021). By the time white social work training programs came into existence in the late 1890s through the support of capitalist industrial philanthropists, the racially segregated system of higher education had already produced generations of white (assumed heterosexual) males, lawyers, legislators, faith leaders, medical experts, economists, anthropologists, psychologists and educators. Their perspectives shaped and informed the knowledge-based social work curricula (Mignolo 2008; Spanierman and Smith 2017; Weaver et al. 2021).

Locating the social work profession within the context of the land-grant university allows us to recognize the historic role of social work as an extension of the state. As a result of this dynamic, the social work imperative to address oppression, including racism and discrimination, is in direct conflict with state-defined paradigms that have overtly or covertly (e.g., disproportionate negative impact on targeted communities) dehumanized. There are now ample sources within the social work literature which account for ways the profession of social and social work education are responsible for harm rooted in settler-colonialism, white supremacy and anti-Black racism (National Association of Social Workers (NASW) 2007, 2021b; Stein 2018; Wright et al. 2021).

Some of the most notable examples of social work’s collusion with systems of white supremacy include the role of social workers in the incarceration of Japanese Americans in US federal internment camps during WWII (Park 2008); the profession’s participation in the removal of indigenous children from their families and their placement in residential schools ridden with abuse (Weaver et al. 2021); the role of social workers in the carceral pipeline (from child welfare to carceral state and immigration) (Bergen and Abji 2019); and the dispossession and extraction of children of color from their communities through the child welfare system. In addition, the professionalization and expert-positioning of social work replace or delegitimizes Indigenous/non-white healers, cultural practices, languages, beliefs, values and lifestyles, and support systems (Weaver et al. 2021).

• Three
• Whiteness walks into a bar with a golden retriever.
• The golden retriever promptly takes a shit on the floor.
• The bartender is like,
• What the fuck, Whiteness?
• Whiteness is like, whoa, whoa, whoa…tone.
• Meanwhile, the dog has started to run
• As it shits, spraying wet feces everywhere.
• And Whiteness is like, you know,
• If you want me to respect you and your cause,
• You could try to be a little less…confrontational.

This history and its contemporary manifestations, with its own nuances, contradictions and complexities, has often been neglected or purposefully erased by institutional memory keepers. In her analysis of the diverging and converging nature of history, writer Patty Krawec (2022) explores the importance of reconnecting with historical truths in order to move toward justice.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz talks about the process of “unforgetting”. The divisions between us are only possible because we have forgotten our history, forgotten our creation stories. Forgotten how to articulate the knowledge that is held in unspoken ways. Unforgetting is the process of reclaiming that knowledge—of moving these truths that our society holds silently out to where we can articulate them and examine them. Then we can see if they really are a center worth revolving around, worth the emotional response they engender. (p. 18)

The process of unforgetting any movements towards accountability by higher education have only occurred through external, grassroots, community-organizing strategic efforts by those at the margins or excluded from institutions (Williams 2012). It is through truth-telling and careful consideration of the history of the American University that institutions begin the journey of accountability and can move towards transformation.

3. Institutional Accountability for Harms of Racial-Settler Capitalism

There is an inevitability to the presence of harm in a current and historical reality governed by violence and greed. Having defined land as a commodity to be owned, taken, sold or traded, racial-settler colonialism created the marketplace and material form of accepted currency to advance the wealth of those already in power at the expense of those whose humanity has been violated. Through these same colonial logics, humans were subjected to violent practices of war and invasion, kidnapping, forced bondage, dismemberment of communities and families, human and animal trafficking, and the severance of kinship networks between people and land. The US at large and land-grant institutions, by proxy, accessed on the benefits from the environmental trafficking network supporting US territorial expansion. Locating these processes as the site of the colonial wound inflicted by racial-settler capitalism ensures that any redress or efforts at repair are proportionate and comprehensive in addressing the life-affirming ecological entanglements which must be restored.

3.1. Rooting Institutional Accountability in Violations of Humanity

The paradigm of universal human rights has become the dominant framework defining basic living standards for all people within our global society. While this perspective is used to contextualize the examination of institutional accountability presented in this paper, it is important to acknowledge Okun’s (2021) elements of white supremacist culture embedded in a moral and ethical paradigm which centers individualism and property ownership as a right. The implications of using a Western framework of human rights as the normative approach to addressing instances of state-based or state-sanctioned harm will be examined in a section below in which we explore non-Western worldviews.

Reparations for Human Rights Violations

Over the course of US history, the concept of reparations has been explored with varying degrees of success in its application. Reparations help to overcome some of the consequences of the harm experienced by victims and should be adequate, effective, and timely (do Greiff 2006; International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) n.d.; United Nations (UN) General Assembly 2005). Importantly, effective reparations are proportional to the gravity of the violations and harm inflicted. They can take the form of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and/or guarantees for non-repetition. Out of a list of 29 examples offered by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly (2005), the following table (

Table 1. Institutional reparation mechanisms for victims of human rights violations (United Nations (UN) General Assembly 2005).

Compensation	For (to the extent it is economically calculated): ·  lost opportunities (employment, education and social); ·  material damages and loss of earnings/earning potential.
Satisfaction	Including the following forms: ·  full public disclosure of the truth; ·  official declaration restoring dignity and rights of victims; ·  public apology, including acknowledgment and acceptance of responsibility; ·  commemorations and tributes to victims.

) includes selected types of reparations most commonly used by institutions today. For the full list, see Appendix A.

• Four
• Whiteness walks into a bar
• And people start to recognize him as the guy who came in last week and stole everyone’s
• wallets.
• The bartender is like, what the fuck, Whiteness?!
• Whiteness is like, hey,
• We cannot change the past, but you know what?
• This round’s on me! Later.
• Whiteness writes off the donation on his taxes, duh.

3.2. Defining Institutional Accountability for Violations of Humanity

The available literature on higher education accountability primarily focuses on efficiency, improving outcomes by persons and managing costs in relation to value (Cox et al. 2017; Dowd and Bensimon 2015; Stein 2018). Macheridis and Paulsson (2021) offer five types of accountability in higher education: political, social, legal, administrative and professional. These types of accountability are not meant to account for the university’s relationship to historical processes or a relational dynamic with communities impacted by the university, but rather the institution’s relationship to current dynamics related to performance outcomes, accreditation and funding. Starting in the 2000s, accountability research saw a shift in the positioning of students as consumers, as well as an increase in studies looking at managerialism and market-driven reforms (Fabricant and Brier 2016). Within a landscape of globalization, the function of “accountability” processes has largely been to monitor and enhance productivity aligned with the goals of capitalism.

Below, several approaches to understanding accountability are offered. In presenting multiple perspectives, we hope to resist the white supremacist tendency to grasp the one right way of knowing what accountability means. It is important to note that most of the meanings presented originate in grass-roots movement spaces, many of which are informed by Black Feminist, Queer movement work. We invite readers to consider the places of tension, disconnect and dissonance, as well as the potential applicability of these approaches to institutional accountability discourse.

3.2.1. Learning from Restorative and Transformative Justice

Within the traditions of restorative and transformative justice, accountability processes that include voluntary practices with a mutual commitment to restoring relationships usually occur between individuals and within communities. Additionally, the conditions support genuine truth-telling, reparations, and healing to occur with minimal fear or risk of punitive harm, coercion or policing. That is, these processes are offered as direct counters to domination and punishment that have been core to maintaining racial settler colonialism. These processes are intentionally created, facilitated and nurtured outside the reach of the state and, therefore, as alternatives to institutional involvement.

Mingus (2019) identifies four components as making up accountability processes: self-reflection, apology, repair and changed behavior. These are not separate but interrelated as self-reflection is expected to increase one’s understanding of the impact of our action on those harmed, which would then meaningfully inform a genuine apology. Our apology would not be centered on our feeling sorry but rather aimed at seeking to repair the harm, regardless of original intent. In recognizing past harm done, one would also commit to changing the specific behavior needed to prevent future harm.

Sered (2019) uses grief as a point of reference for understanding accountability as a process of recognizing one’s responsibility for harm in the process of restoring us to a better version of ourselves. Burk (2016) similarly connects accountability to a process of recognizing harms caused to others and ourselves as a resource for redressing such harms while holding space for both of these experiences as complex. In a way, this framing speaks to the phrase “hurt people, hurt people” by inviting empathy and interconnectedness to inform choices around redress within the context of community accountability. Perez-Darby (2011) talks about accountability through a transformative framework of self-accountability as a process through “we’re acting with integrity by taking responsibility for who we are in the world and for living in alignment with our values” (cited in Kaba et al. 2020). Jeffries-Logan et al. (n.d.) describe accountability as a form of solidarity which acknowledges socially constructed hierarchical systems of oppression and honors “essential interdependence” by divorcing social conditioning and instead acting based on the alignment between our personal and collective interests. Anti-racist organizers, Cushing et al. (2011), refer to practices of accountability as transparent processes of commitment to actively participating in identified outcome; whether externally imposed (as through legal or regulatory imperative) or determined internally by an institution, organization, community or interpersonal relationship.

3.2.2. Learning from Reparative Justice

Restorative and transformative justice are increasingly visible in social work education, discourse, and occasionally practice. The theorizing and practice of accountability from restorative and transformative justice can help in conceptualizing accountability for institutions. Both have much to offer in conceptualizing and actualizing accountability in the context of interpersonal and community harms, in particular when institutions like higher education are incapable of or unwilling to hold themselves accountable for truth-telling and reparative action. Additionally, reparative justice has sought to offer the scaffolding in conceptualizing accountability from institutions in addressing, repairing and transforming the harms of racial settler colonialism and human rights violation more generally.

Reparative justice has sought to address and repair large-scale harm largely by states and governments. It is generally understood as primarily referring to reparations for violations of human rights, and in the US, this is most commonly used to refer to reparations for chattel slavery (Muddell and Hawkins 2018). Still, the term is increasingly being used as a way to understand reparations for racial harms of ongoing state violence (Chicago Torture Justice Memorial (CTJM) n.d.) and arguably could be used as a (western) way to refer to accountability for harm to indigenous people of Turtle Island and efforts, such as the rematriation of Indigenous land. The theorizing and practice of accountability through the lens of reparative justice offers useful analysis, elements and practices for conceptualizing accountability in higher education.

Reparative justice is, in part, about creating new social relations of accountability in which current harm is stopped, and the harms of the past can be acknowledged and transformed such that a mutuality (and the conditions that create mutuality) exists to prevent future harm. In writing about reparative justice, Walker (2015) argues that “reparations are about demonstrating (rather than establishing) relations of accountability and reciprocity that no process or program of reparations can itself guarantee” (p. 217). That is, if reparative justice is to be successful, it must not be transactional but transformational, such that new social relations of accountability are possible as a result. These social relations include those between people, but it is institutions and the state that must also be transformed.

Reparative justice teaches that for this transformation to occur and for new social relations of accountability to be possible, both acknowledgment and repair are necessary. One framing of reparative justice offers three essential components; to acknowledge, to atone, and to act (Drug Policy Alliance 2019). In the framework of reparative justice, acknowledgment is often referred to as both the process and practice of truth-telling and truth-finding and is a cornerstone of reparative approaches to accountability (Stanley 2001; Stanton 2011). Still, the most visible examples of truth-telling vis a vis truth and reconciliation processes have been heavily critiqued as limited in their ability to offer meaningful repair or lasting social transformation (Ngari and Kayuni 2019). To act, or to repair, often comes in the form of reparations from the state or other institutions, and historically has been the most difficult to realize. Repair is not only about direct restitution to people who have been harmed by the state or other institutions but addressing the root causes of harm and the transformation of social and political institutions to disrupt current harm and prevent further harm (Agozino 2021; Walker 2015).

3.3. Land-Based Healing as a Measure of Institutional Accountability for Land-Grant Universities

The multiple approaches and models for understanding accountability presented above present responses to harm that are meant to occur outside system control and surveillance in recognition of the violence inherent in systems. There are tensions and limitations in applying approaches designed to address interpersonal or community-level harm to institutional accountability discourse. This paper focuses on the role and responsibility of land-grant universities based on their creation and expansion being entangled with racial-settler colonial violence. In particular, the violent breakage in the relationship of kinship between people and land is identified as a site of colonial wounding. Accountable action by institutions of higher education benefiting from the Morrill Act of 1862 seeking to address this harm must be proportionate to the damage and impact suffered from the violence. Reparative efforts require the removal of barriers to the connection of people and land as kin. Restorative action must be in alignment with the healing of these broken or damaged bonds. Land-based healing is conceptualized as a measure of effective accountability processes by land-grant institutions. However, what are ways institutions can be part of land-based healing without replicating, contributing to and continuing to benefit from harm rooted in colonial violence?

This paper explores the concept of land-based healing as a contribution to the discourse on institutional accountability within the context of higher education by asserting the importance of peoples’ connection with land and kinship with nature. Decolonizing approaches to accountability are non-anthropocentric, fluid, holistic and relational. The relational web includes human connections with all living beings, the natural world, ancestors and future generations, and the cosmos at all scales. Thus, the process of repairing, restoring and healing these connections will take a multiplicity of forms, sizes and temporalities. Land-based healing thus requires a paradigm shift, not as the counterpoint to Western ways of being and knowing, but rather as ways of knowing and being with a history predating colonialism which will survive industrial capitalism and colonialism (Clarke and Yellowbird 2021).

Settler’s ways of knowing generally center on a positivist paradigm that advances the notion that ways of knowing are based on a single truth and reality. Indigenous Peoples, on the other hand, are more likely to recognize that there is no single reality. Consequently, Indigenous people throughout the world have developed complex ontologies of being closely linked with place that mirror contemporary concepts of quantum physics…

(Clarke and Yellowbird 2021, p. 81)

The distinction between ontological definitions of accountability from land-based healing perspectives (involving transformative, restorative, and reparative processes) and the way accountability is defined through the logic of the racial-settler capitalist institution is a fundamental limitation in the potential for institutional accountability within a racial-settler education system. As peoples with values of interconnectedness and Spirit-based understandings of the world and the role of humans in it, indigenous worldviews (whether on the African or American continent) are irreconcilable with an alternative universe dominated entirely by logics and ontological assumptions of the need for violence and subjugation. Social work education needs decolonial frameworks for institutional accountability, which can help bridge these ontological and epistemological gaps. The next section uses de Oliveira Andreotti et al.’s (2015) mapped visual synthesis of different understandings regarding decolonial work in higher education to frame an analysis of the ways land-grant universities might engage with the discourse around institutional accountability and the potentiality for land-based healing.

• Five
• Whiteness walks into a bar and tips over a glass
• With his elbow,
• It shatters into a million pieces.
• Whiteness walks up to the bartender and says,
• Excuse me,
• [heavy pause]
• It appears that there is glass on the floor…
• Slowly, everyone in the bar rises
• To their feet and begins to clap,
• Moved by Whiteness’
• Bravery and honesty.
• Women throw handkerchiefs at Whiteness’ feet,
• Everyone shakes Whiteness’ hand,
• Whiteness gets offered a TED talk.
• Meanwhile, no one notices the janitor sweeping up the glass.
• No one ever notices the ones doing the real work.

4. Decolonial Theoretical Framework to Conceptualize and Examine Possibility of Institutional Accountability

A review of the historical attempts at taking institutional responsibility for their complicity in the harms of racial-settler colonialism presents a narrow range of approaches. Accountability processes are not native to institutions. In the US, most of the emergent scholarship and practice wisdom about institutional accountability for causing or benefiting from human rights violations comes out of grass-roots, community-level efforts outside the carceral state and implicated systems/institutions. Accountability, from a perspective which centers on the worth and dignity of all people, holds space for the tension between a social commitment to individual freedoms and to the levels of responsibility we each carry based on our inescapable interconnectedness.

The authors of this paper question whether it is possible for institutions of social work higher education to engage in accountability processes for their entanglements with land-based harm. Using the violence of European colonialism as the departure point which severed the connection to land for the global majority in the most profound ways, a decolonial framework is identified as an appropriate contestation to the question of institutional accountability in the 21st century. Whereas colonialism is conceptualized as having an “ending” through the geopolitical independence or sovereignty of a nation from an empire, coloniality refers to the settler capitalist, racist, homophobic, sexist ideologies which remain entangled in a so-called “post-colonial” modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2007).

The myth of the able-bodied, Christian, White, cis-heterosexual male as the superior, rational, normal model of an evolutionary mature, industrious, modern civilization survives colonialism (Cho et al. 2013; Mignolo 2008). Coloniality has been sustained through the persistent classification of humans into hierarchical groups by religion, blood and/or color established by Christian, European, socio-politically and economically elite men as justification for the exploitation and expendability of human lives deemed inferior to those in power (Mignolo 2008). Grosfugel (2008) and Mignolo (2017) identify the following sociohistorical domains of control through which coloniality operates:

• Economic control via land ownership, labor, and debt;
• Control of authority through imperial institutions (founded during colonialism), including the use of military force and surveillance;
• Control of gender and sexuality as justified by both Christian (Catholic and Protestant) and pseudoscientific reasonings (such as “race”and “gender” as a “scientific” classification);
• Control of knowledge by assuming the Age of Enlightenment in Europe as the point of arrival for human modernity, with knowledge defined by cognitive reason and the centrality of individuality.

Within academia in the US, decoloniality or decolonizing approaches have long been called for by indigenous and Black Feminist scholars (hooks 1994; Clarke and Yellowbird 2021; Tuck and Yang 2012). Scholars from Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and Australia (Global South) and representatives of the global majority within the Global North (in particular Black and Queer Feminist scholars) offer multiple approaches for examining the long-standing patterns of dominance left as legacies from colonial administrators through organized systems and domains (hooks 1994; Lugones 2016; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Chambati 2013). Decolonial ways of knowing expand theorizing technologies to include practices of cartography and spatial mapping in the service of power analyses that can allow for safer navigation for those who have, in effect, been erased from historical records.

Grassroots movements demand for institutional accountability to be enacted in responses matching the speed, intensity and devastating magnitude of the violence by interrelated systems of oppression. In addition, Black, Indigenous and Women of Color (BIWOC) and others belonging to marginalized identities with institutional roles and responsibilities face additional complexity and contradictions in holding varying degrees of privilege based on intersectional dimensions of power and, therefore, “differentially distributed complicities” with the coloniality of higher education (Stein 2018). However, it is in the complexities, tensions, dynamic fluidity and unpredictability of multiple approaches and solutions that an antidote (or multiple antidotes) to the poison of racial-settler colonial capitalism will be found. de Oliveira Andreotti et al. (2015) developed a social cartography approach to mapping the tensions, paradoxes and contradictions found in the literature when considering the role of higher education in benefiting from, contributing to, and perpetuating the violence of a racial-settler colonial modernity4.

Through an analysis of critical dialogue amongst scholars in higher education seeking to engage in decolonizing efforts within the university, de Oliveira Andreotti et al. (2015) identified four main discursive spaces: conservative, soft-reform, radical-reform and beyond-reform based on distinguishable commitments and orientations. The visual synthesis (Figure 1) of theoretical analyses as spatial locations for decolonization within the context of higher education is offered as a way to distill some of the challenges and limitations of engaging with the question of institutional accountability related to land-based healing/repair while existing in a racial-settler capitalist society. The conservative space5 was not included in the map in order to allow for the examination of important tensions held within liberal and progressive discourses in the public university.

In Figure 1, the three spaces mapped by de Oliveira Andreotti et al. (2015, p. 25) attempt to distinguish how the “problem” of modernity is defined, which then informs the scope of possible “solutions”: Soft-Reform, Radical Reform and Beyond-Reform. One interpretation of its organization is that it depicts a type of progression from left to right, with the right-most space reflecting a higher level of consciousness or awareness achieved through learning, experience or cognitive skill. However, from a more psychoanalytic perspective, the “beyond-reform” space can be interpreted as an area of subconscious awareness regarding the violence of modernity repressed by the cognitive mind as a way to avoid facing the potential losses (of privileges and experiences of safety/comfort) or other unknown changes that accompany a shift into that space. A different approach to this potential simultaneity in spatial experience is the interpretation that we might constantly shift between and across discursive spaces as we navigate our various social contexts and roles, sometimes incoherently, with contradictions and frustrations.

An overview of each space is presented below with a speculative offering of what institutional accountability by land-grant universities might entail, given what is known about university approaches to facing higher education’s ties to legacies of racial-settler colonialism.

4.1. Modernity Affirming Space

While not explicitly including the conservative space, the map accounts for a “modernity affirming” space in which problems are acknowledged, yet, the focus is placed on how much progress has been made and how great things are now compared to in the past for those who experience oppression. For example, there may be an acknowledgment regarding the horrors of slavery and the tragic losses experienced by indigenous peoples. However, these sad stories and harms are located in a distant past with no direct consequence on present conditions and, therefore, no personal implication in these stories or liability for the historical or contemporary consequences. In this space, the logic and design of the university go unexamined and are often supported by narratives that produce distance and severe connections to the harm and those harmed. Here, accountability is predicated on personal responsibility for not being a burden to society and a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal morality. Individuals are accountable for maintaining the established social order “for the greater good”.

4.1.1. Speculating Modernity Affirming Potentials and Limitations in Higher Education

Institutional “accountability” from a modernity-affirming space may entail improving the efficiency of existing institutions. Within higher education, this seemingly neutral approach might be the creation of departments to study the history of land-grant institutions as an archeological endeavor. A new specialization or certificate could be created to educate and train professional land-based managers and coordinators. Such projects would prioritize efficiency, productivity, and the development of industrial technologies with a market value based on profit for existing corporations. In keeping with the status quo, white male experts would most likely be the true beneficiaries of modernity-affirming “accountability” efforts.

Perhaps celebratory awards are created for exceptional individuals representative of historically marginalized groups who have “made it” under the dominant definition of success. At best, this space might function to perpetuate narratives around color-blindness and the notion of post-racial modernity as evidenced by the stellar accomplishments of Black and Indigenous peoples holding positions of power within institutions (e.g., former president Barack Obama). Those in power would continue to be driven by the continued accumulation of wealth via extractive and exploitative “business as usual” practices.

4.1.2. Affirming Modernity in Social Work

The emphasis placed on promoting the resilience of historically oppressed people within social work has aligned with such power-blind approaches when separated from the socio-historical context, which offers the backdrop for conditions of oppression. Social work higher education’s implicit curriculum rarely departs from Western capitalist forms of schooling, which promote competition, individualism, text-based and quantifiable forms of knowledge, and the evaluation of worth by an expert who is the holder of knowledge and grading power. It is only recently that social work explicit curricula are increasingly integrating critical approaches to the history of the profession and its past and current complicity with structures of white supremacy and settler-colonialism.

4.2. Soft-Reform Space

In the soft-reform space, inequalities are acknowledged and understood as stemming from an unfair lack of integration into the system. Thus, the answer takes the form of inclusion through system expansion and efforts to integrate diverse perspectives into the established standard practices or culture of the institution. Such provisional acceptance of “the other” is subject to being revoked for those who “make waves” or fail to assimilate into patterns of white paternalism, privileging white comfort and replicating hierarchies of control. Soft-reform work avoids conflict, and when differences of opinions arise, these are talked through rationally and using white supremacist cultural logic. Non-mainstream approaches may be deemed violent, unproductive, uncivilized, and militant- all dangerous to a society that values conformity.

Similar to modernity-affirming spaces, there is an emphasis on excellence, entrepreneurialism and individual personal self-improvement. Soft reform does not examine the unfulfillable promise of a capitalist meritocracy Mijs (2016). Rather, the phrase “you have to work twice as hard” is echoed to young Black, Indigenous and people of color as both an encouraging expectation and dooming life sentence. The white experience as an object of comparison is not examined. Resistance from the margins is aimed at disrupting barriers to access and advancement within the institutions, such that to overcome is to gain “a seat at the table” already set up for failure. System and structural change are determined to be beyond our reach (unless political advocacy is our full-time activity, perhaps), and at times not even desirable as this would eliminate our turn to “win”. Thus, change within the soft-reform space is predominantly symbolic and enacted as compliance. Although this space may include some shifts in institutional identity that affirmed the concepts of anti-racism, equity and inclusivity in policy, recruitment efforts, committees and offered training in such areas, there is minimal energy directed at changing institutional structures of power unless a “win-win” outcome is identified, allowing those with power to retain the convenience of privilege.

4.2.1. Speculating Soft-Reform as Institutional Accountability in Higher Education

Land-grant institutions engaging in soft reforms can establish merit-based or need-based scholarships for Indigenous and Black scholars, perhaps with a focus on students who are doing land-based work (and can demonstrate this through documented evidence). Recipients might be offered minority-serving/remedial academic services meant to help students of color “catch-up” with their white, more affluent and institutionally resourced counterparts- thus “leveling the playing field”. Special (small) grants might be created for students or faculty to apply towards projects related to land-based healing/reparative work (with a complicated disbursement process and resource-consuming evaluation requirements). Black, Indigenous and students of color can be offered incentives for specializing in science, technology and industrial agriculture through partnerships with corporations which may even commit to hiring students graduating from these programs. Comparable to the use of reflexivity as a social work competence, a soft-reform space only requires institutions to engage in processes of self-reflection and demonstrating self-awareness regarding its “positionality”. Institutional reflexivity may extend to practices of listening and considering multiple perspectives in the deliberation of certain decisions informed by a seemingly superficial analysis of power, privilege and oppression, which reveals socially constructed hierarchies (such as through the appointment of DEI task forces or committees) but allows it to remain uninvolved with any particular course of action to change these (Ahmed 2006; Formenti and Rigamonti 2020).

4.2.2. Soft-Reform in Social Work Education

Research on approaches to social change by social workers reflects a preference for participating in electoral processes compared to engaging in community organizing, direct action or civil disobedience. Caught in binary thinking, the profession has yet to reconcile its role in supporting individual responsibility and self-determination while also actively addressing systemic barriers limiting people’s choices and experiences. Thus, responses from this space by social work programs may include an acknowledgment of historical harms while offering additional training for individuals to increase their awareness of issues and presumably make more responsible choices. In response to past unfairness, resources are directed towards remediation programs, promoting mentorship, and leadership skill-based training. An acknowledgment of historical harm within this soft-reform space narrowly defines the effects of the racial-settler colonial harm as having produced exclusion or lack of access to higher education institutional spaces for Black and Indigenous people as the primary wound inflicted. There is an assumption that with growing awareness of historical violent occurrences and legacies of privilege, people in power within institutions will “do the right thing” and find ways to support the (deserving) efforts of those less fortunate.

4.3. Radical Reform Space

A radical-reform space recognizes that to focus on better equipping historically marginalized groups to excel within white institutional terrain is akin to petitioning for a “position to live, in conditions that kill.” (Waln 2016). It is the conditions of oppression that necessitate change and which are inherently designed to produce inequitable outcomes. Radical-reform approaches are not satisfied with a “seat at the table,” having realized even the seating arrangement is organized according to hierarchies and taking a seat requires one to engage in a multitude of performative rituals, including the violation of one’s own and other’s humanity, as proof of belonging (e.g., professional or proper institutional etiquette). A radical-reform approach breaks with respectability politics. It is from this space that uncomfortable questions emerge about the source of the wood used to make the table, the labor used in its production, whether the dimensions of the room are accessible to multiple types of bodies, and whether all voices have a turn to speak. In this way, the recognition of hegemonic forms of knowledge is accompanied by demands for the system to start “playing fair”.

Historically, radical reform has included empowerment initiatives, efforts at increasing representation while ensuring equitable compensation and addressing instances of discrimination and/or redistribution of resources, such as the rematriation of land to indigenous people. Affirmative action and the departments of Ethnic Studies are examples of byproducts of radical-reform efforts in the US, which continue to be contested today by conservative voices. Truth and reconciliation commissions seeking to address state-level harm have also served as models for institutional accountability efforts to varying degrees and success. A critique of radical-reform spaces is that they tend to focus on single dimensions of oppression rather than an intersectional approach to transforming institutions. This has led to missed opportunities for practicing cross-movement solidarity as well as the replication of hierarchies of oppression within movement spaces.

4.3.1. Speculating Radical-Reform as Institutional Accountability in Higher Education

More accountable responses to demands by grassroots movements seeking to address land-based harm related to higher education could include the creation of departments or centers, the launching of truth-finding historical task forces, and community engagement initiatives offering public-facing material benefits to historically marginalized communities. From this spatial orientation, critical discourse forums and classroom discussions may be enacted, along with the creation of committees and task forces charged with finding ways to address the university’s complicity in racial-settler colonialism. Substantial recommendations will sometimes emerge through the labor and risk-taking of Black, indigenous and people of color within these academic spaces (and an occasional white co-conspirator). The regretful land-grant university might take on an anti-colonialism land-back campaign or, alternatively, an anti-(Anti-black) racism campaign, often offering parallel university programming to all students lest they be accused of reverse discrimination.

Special multicultural or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) empowering programming featuring the few Black and indigenous faculty might be offered, including lectures, special courses, and conferences on the issue of land-based healing and accountability by higher education. As material offerings of accountability, the institution might offer extensive, thorough reports on its history as a land-grab university and celebrate the land-based work being done by grassroots groups- maybe even creating an award to confer to community members. Alternatively, or additionally, memorial sites commemorating the communities who lived on the land on which the institution stands prior to the contact with European settlers. The work done by these collectives of institutional organizers runs the risk of falling victim to institutional historical amnesia, becoming one-time events under the pressure of dominant culture, agendas and neoliberal priorities.

4.3.2. Radical-Reform in Social Work Education

The integration of anti-oppressive discourse into social work education has varied across institutions. A common thread amongst all accredited social work programs is their adherence to the educational standards set by the CSWE. The most recent version of the EPAS by the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE) (2022) is its most radical iteration to date. For the first time in the history of the profession, the language of anti-racism, equity and inclusion is expected to be reflected across implicit and explicit curriculum for all accredited social work programs, regardless of the stance taken by the larger university or school. In 2021, the CSWE published a 40-page statement of accountability and reconciliation “provided as both an acknowledgment of the harms done to Indigenous and Tribal Peoples by the social work profession and as a key resource for social work educators…We recognize that harms remain in the present through the ongoing colonial relationship. As social work educators, we must engage across education, practice, and policy to repair past harms, eliminate current ones, and prevent future ones”.

4.4. Beyond-Reform Space

An approach to accountability that recognizes the institution is beyond-reform acknowledges that any efforts born out of the institution will be informed by ontologically dominant perspectives (Yee 2016; Huang and Weaver-Hightower 2018). Rather than taking single-issue approaches to address the historical context and present implications of the institution’s ties to intersectional forces of oppression (including white supremacy, settler-colonialism, capitalism, cisheteronormativity, patriarchy, hegemonic Christianity), there is an acknowledgment and exploration regarding the implications of engaging in resisting dominant ways of knowing, the roots of ideologies of dominance extend deeply into foundational dominant ways of being (Stein 2018). In many ways, any efforts at accountability are recognized as a largely performative process by the institution (Ahmed 2006; Squire et al. 2019). Stewart-Ambo and Yang (2020) utilize a beyond, or third university, framework to signal the need for our analysis to expand beyond the parameters for imagination determined by the institution.

Speculating Institutional Accountability as Beyond-Reform

The first possibility found in the beyond-reform space is that of alternative spaces to the institution. Thus, the accountability process of an institution may be strategically used towards short-term goals guided by the long-term vision of abolishing the conditions which make the university, as a radical-settler colonial project, possible. Within this context, the institution could rematriate or redistribute resources to external communities and organizations, thus, transferring full autonomy, agency, and/or sovereignty over the resources to support the creation and sustainability of alternative forms of community-led forms of accountability, repairing and healing within their relationship to the land.

A second possible approach to accountability by an institution ready to acknowledge their complicity and responsibility for repairing harm as a land-grant recipient might be (hijacking) creating spaces in which Black and Indigenous scholar-activists, educators, and practitioners can work towards land-based healing without having to worry about institutional backlash or retaliation. This stance follows in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois’ appropriation of university resources as part of the abolitionist strategy in the Black freedom movement (Gary and Gary 1994). Currently, engaging in epistemic disobedience comes with high risks to those navigating academia, yet not taking these risks arguably comes at the expense of deeper relational, cultural, and spiritual costs (Harney and Moten 2013). Rather than acting, the institution can commit to removing itself and allowing folks already doing the work to function without the type of administrative oversight which often impedes sustainable project implementation and/or places Black and indigenous individuals in conditions of over-extension and burn-out. Harney and Moten (2013) describe the path of the “subversive intellectual” as: “To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of…” (n.p.).

The third offered possible response in applying de Oliveira Andreotti et al.’s (2015) mapping to the question of land-based accountability, and perhaps the least likely to materialize, consists of institutions taking the stance that the university in its current form is destined to die as the late-stage capitalism sustaining higher education becomes increasingly unsustainable. From a “hospicing” orientation, resources would be directed towards studying the history and archiving forms of knowledge relevant to informing future alternatives, emerging or yet to be created, based on lessons learned.

In this reality, acknowledging the university’s inescapable ties to the violence of coloniality, the accountability process in this space acknowledges the inability of the racial-settler colonial institution to offer meaningful amends or reparations for the damage it has been complicit in and benefited from (McCleary and Simard 2021). While efforts are made to acknowledge its role, stop ongoing harm, and offer attempts at ameliorating the effects of the harm, these are overtly contextualized as insufficient, yet necessary and important, in comparison to the suffering and pain caused by their existence.

The institution takes account of its history and functioning in order to serve as an example of what we should not (re)create while potentially salvaging institutional tools, technologies, and/or artifacts which may prove useful within the context of a non-Western worldview (de Oliveira Andreotti et al. 2015). This type of accountability process, while allowing for an autopsy, invites planning processes by which Black and indigenous communities can identify and claim what parts/resources might be useful to their already ongoing land-based healing works. The university is declared a failed experiment by a global majority seeking to realign humanity with life-affirming ways of being. What would education look like if collaboratively constructed based on the knowledge that people originate from Spirit and are on this planet with an interconnected purpose in relationships to one another and the land (McCleary and Simard 2021)?

• Six
• Here is the real punchline,
• Whiteness was always in the bar,
• Whiteness built the bar.
• Whiteness owns the bar,
• Any damage he does to the bar,
• He is just doing to himself,
• And Whiteness cannot hurt Whiteness.

5. Contemporary Struggles for Institutional Accountability

Historic struggles for institutional accountability have primarily focused on reparations from the state. The following efforts are noted here to contextualize and integrate the conceptual framing of institutional accountability with recent and active concrete relevant struggles.

As noted earlier, struggles for rematriation have expanded the terrain of accountability beyond the state, including the university. Although class action lawsuits and legislative lobbying have failed to provide reparations for descendants of enslaved people, and have been limited in realizing institutional accountability for the harms of colonization, community-based efforts for institutional accountability, led by social movements and grassroots organizations, have put forth more robust demands of institutions, and have made some progress in enacting substantive repair. Reviewing contemporary struggles for institutional accountability illuminates both these robust demands and slow but significant progress toward accountability. This section begins with examples of efforts for reparations and rematriation broadly; then to struggles outside of the university focused on university accountability; followed by examples at the edges of the university; and, lastly, examples of accountability from within the university are provided.

5.1. Broadly Outside of the University

Examples outside of the university include fights for rematriation of Indigenous land, for reparations for acts of state violence, and for reparative measures for federal and state policies that have disproportionately harmed Black and Indigenous communities. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and The Chicago Torture Justice Memorials are two instructive examples that set forth visionary demands for accountability and have made progress in realizing them.

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an Indigenous women-led land trust that is working towards the rematriation of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. Their work is focused on the practices of rematriation, cultural vitalization and land restoration. They write

We envision a Bay Area in which Ohlone language and ceremony are an active, thriving part of the cultural landscape, where Ohlone place names and history is known and recognized and where intertribal Indigenous communities have affordable housing, social services, cultural centers and land to live, work and pray on.

(Sogorea Te’ Land Trust n.d.)

(The Chicago Torture Justice Memorial (CTJM) n.d.) began in 2010 through an effort to memorialize two decades of struggle by survivors of police torture of John Burge and his police department. Three years later, CTJM drafted a reparations ordinance to provide reparative action for 120 Black people who were tortured by John Burge and his subordinates. In 2015, after two years of relentless organizing, the reparations ordinance was passed by the Chicago City Council, becoming the first city-wide reparations ordinance in the country. The ordinance included financial restitution for torture survivors, a formal apology from the Chicago Mayor, a permanent public memorial, provision of counseling services and free college tuition to survivors and their families, and a history curriculum to be taught in Chicago public schools in the 8th and 10th grade (Chicago Torture Justice Memorial (CTJM) n.d.).

5.2. Outside of the University for University Accountability

Here, two efforts that exist outside of the university but focus on university accountability are highlighted. While these two examples are journalistic in nature and focused on acknowledgment, they use databases to highlight how universities have expropriated Indigenous land and remains and expose the responsibility that universities have today.

Land-Grab Universities is a project led by High Country News that offers both a history of how universities expropriated Indigenous land as well as a detailed database about which universities were given land by the US government, how much land they were given, to which tribal nations the land was expropriated from, and how much universities benefited from these violations (Lee et al. 2020).

The Repatriation Project is led by ProPublica using data from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to expose that, despite the passing of this Act in 1990, the remains of more than 210,000 Indigenous people remain in universities and museums. The project found that 10 universities hold more than half of these remains that have not been returned to Indigenous communities (Propublica 2023).

5.3. At the Edges of the University

Scholars for Social Justice (SSJ) is a network of progressive scholars in the US, and one of their core projects is focused on reparations in higher education. Since 2016, the SSJ Reparations in Higher Education working group created a framework for reparations in institutions of higher education and has examined the myriad of racial harms that universities are responsible for (Scholars for Social Justice n.d.). In doing so, they have created a reparations framework that attends to the varying roles universities have, including as employer, investor, and neighbor, and as institutions that have played roles in policies of institutional racism like mass incarceration.

The Towards Recognition and University-Tribal Healing—TRUTH—project is led and organized by Indigenous people and is a community-driven research project working to make recommendations about how the University of Minnesota can be in better relation with Indigenous people. They write, “The first of its kind, TRUTH is an exploratory study to assess what has been erased and effaced in order to reclaim what was grabbed by the University” (The TRUTH Project 2023).

5.4. Within the University

Crafting Democratic Futures (CDF) is a project housed at the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan and has created a national network of humanities scholars across nine geographically diverse colleges and universities “to develop research-informed, community-based reparations plans for each location” (Crafting Democratic Futures (CDF) n.d.). CDF defines reparations as any attempt to repair the historical harms and contemporary injustices committed against African American and Native communities as a result of policies and practices installed during the periods of chattel enslavement, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. While this can include financial redress from the U.S. government, it can also include a national apology and educational, housing, and healthcare programs. Rather than place strict parameters around reparations solutions, CDF emphasizes the importance of a nuanced, humanistic approach that centers on local histories in telling a fuller account of racial harm and informing the solutions that follow, all in the spirit of repair and reconciliation (Crafting Democratic Futures (CDF) n.d.).

Universities Studying Slavery (USS) is a consortium of more than ninety institutions of higher learning in the US, Canada and the UK that are working together to develop shared principles and practice as they develop truth-telling projects about human bondage and legacies of racism at their own institutions. The USS originated from the University of Virginia President’s Commission on Slavery and the University and is made up of both public and private colleges and universities.

Within higher education, as of the summer of 2022, over 95 universities were formally investigating their historical involvement in the slave trade (Moscufo 2022). The truths revealed by reports have often resulted in student demands for reparations. Some of the forms of reparations identified from across organized actions include the creation of a physical memorial on school grounds, taxing endowments, taxing universities’ properties for added municipal funding, increasing payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT), participation in divestment campaigns, highlighting historical ties to slavery in campus tours, and direct financial support offered to descendants of enslaved people owned by universities or affiliated individuals.

There has been some success in these efforts. In 2020, Brown permanently endowed a $10 million fund to finance the “high quality” education of public school students residing in Providence. Other universities with similar approaches include Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Glasgow. The University of Harvard received significant media attention when it announced its commitment to $100 million towards “redress” of its ties to slavery- to be spent based on the recommendations of an implementation committee (Moscufo 2022). The following recommendations were included in a comprehensive report by Harvard University (Bacow et al. 2022):

• Engage and Support Descendant Communities by Leveraging Harvard’s Excellence in Education;
• Honor Enslaved People through Memorialization, Research, Curricula, and Knowledge Dissemination;
• Develop Enduring Partnerships with Black Colleges and Universities;
• Identify, Engage, and Support Direct Descendants;
• Honor, Engage, and Support Native Communities;
• Establish an Endowed Legacy of Slavery to Support the University’s Reparative Efforts;
• Ensure Institutional Accountability.

Like the USS consortium, the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers, funded by the W.K. Kellog Foundation, are now in nearly 75 college campuses across the country (Rutgers University n.d.; W.K. Kellog Foundation n.d.). These centers are part of a multi-year national community-based process to support truth-telling, racial healing, and systemic transformation on college campuses.

Gidinawemaaganinaanig: Endazhigiyang (All Our Relations: The Place Where We All Grow) is the name given to the land that was rematriated to the Anishinaabe people by Oakland University. This rematriation stemmed from an assignment from an indigenous college student at Oakland University who drafted a land acknowledgment for the school. The land acknowledgment was eventually adopted by the University and would later lead to the school rematriating one acre of land to the Anishinaabe people. Oakland University says that “Rematriation, above all else, recognizes and respects the sovereignty not only of Tribal nations and their ancestral practices and cultures but also that of non-humans living on the land” (Peiser and Knutson 2022).

From outside the university to the university itself, there are numerous examples of efforts struggling for institutional accountability, primarily through reparations and rematriation. A full analysis of these examples is beyond the scope of this paper, but together they demonstrate that efforts outside of institutions, in this case, institutions of higher education, make bolder demands that seek to realize decolonial realities and are more difficult to actualize. Conversely, efforts within institutions may more quickly realize their victories while asking for less, to begin with.

• Seven
• Whiteness walks in,
• Whiteness walks in on 80 feet,
• Whiteness wears a body in small doses.
• Whiteness uses its 80 mouths to ask me to tell it about itself.
• So I say, Whiteness,
• You are a poor substitute for blood.
• Whiteness, you are a bad joke
• Everyone is too uncomfortable to laugh at.

6. Conclusions

Social work higher education has the potential to inform structural and institutional processes of addressing harm guided by the values of the profession. As discourse around decolonizing social work higher education is increasingly adopted by social work faculty and administrators, the glaring tensions between the larger current and historical context of social work higher education and commitments to anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion become amplified. Concepts such as “healing” and “accountability,” rooted in social justice movement spaces, run the risk of becoming co-opted, diluted or disconnected from their original contexts, purpose and meanings as they become integrated into academia while schools navigate pressures from public and private funding sources to remain “neutral”, “apolitical” or adhere to conservative values.

This paper calls upon social work higher education to engage in institutional reflexivity. This reflexivity requires demonstrating self-awareness of its institutional positionality by examining what practices of institutional accountability might look like within the context of racial-settler violence of capitalism. A “post-#MeToo” world arguably shifted the paradigm around accountability for harm-doing (regardless of intention) in the dominant culture. Apologies are no longer enough.

Currently, there is limited research on how social work higher education is confronting the institutional challenges of defining and enacting institutional accountability. Moreover, there is an existing tension between contemporary efforts of accountability by institutions and the mission of social work in higher education (Mayorga et al. 2019; Threatte 2022; Weaver et al. 2021). The CSWE 2021 Statement of Accountability and Reconciliation offers that the first step to reconciliation is truth (recognition of the disenfranchised grief), accompanied by studying and confronting the history of harm in forging a path forward. The statement calls for social work education to engage in efforts to repair past harms, halt current harm, and prevent future harm. The 2022 edition of the CSWE EPAS charges institutions of social work education with the responsibility of not only producing anti-racist social workers but also transforming the institutions of social work higher education to reflect anti-racist and anti-oppressive values.

The profound disconnect between land and human identity violently enforced upon indigenous peoples of what is now the American and African continents anchors an analysis of land-based harm as a fundamental site of racial-settler colonial harm warranting accountability processes of acknowledgment, apology or atonement, repair, restitution, healing and transformation. Because settler-colonial land-based harm directly impacted Black and Indigenous populations, we propose that any effective healing and reparative solutions must support the liberation of Black and Indigenous populations. We also propose that any effective approach must include a commitment to land-based healing. Institutions of higher education must take institutional accountability for this work as they have participated in and/or benefited from these violations of humanity.

In seeking to contribute towards the implementation of institutional accountability practices within social work higher education, this paper offers a decolonial framework and examines the implications of divorcing Western ways of knowing and being as we explore possibilities for institutional action anchored in land-based healing. Future directions for this work include developing an institutional accountability assessment. An institutional accountability assessment will allow (1) the gauging of acknowledgment and reparation efforts, (2) institutions to be critically informed and intentional about their accountability efforts, (3) the development of resources and supports for efforts of institutional accountability guided by land-based approaches, and (4) the dissemination of learnings and ideas to flow through and between institutions engage in work for justice, healing, and liberation.

• Whiteness, I am laughing in the back of the classroom.
• I am throwing your desks out the window.
• I am setting fire to the bar.
• I am laughing until your legs are small.
• I am laughing until your blood is thin.
• I am laughing until your throat is parched.
• I am laughing until you are small and afraid and
• Wailing on me with your tiny fists.
• And it is funny, you know, it is so funny.