Our university, like many, was built on and later profited from the sale of distant Native lands, people who were enslaved, and through the sale of enslaved labor. Now we inhabit a complex space that is also home to immigrants from all over the world, who labor at and attend the university. As students, faculty, and staff at this institution, we have a responsibility to engage with this history and how it shapes our current relationships to one another, to our North Carolina community, and to ongoing global and local impacts that are connected to this history: from gentrification at home to research abroad.
Through the Landback / Abolition Project in the UNC Geography Department, graduate and undergraduate students conduct public-facing primary research at UNC Libraries archives to outline how UNC was built on and later profited from the sale of distant Native lands, people who were enslaved, and through the sale of enslaved labor. Using ArcGIS Storymaps, students draw on and bridge Indigenous principles of land-as-pedagogy and Black Geographies practices connecting land and liberation. This research began in Fall 2022 in Dr. Smith’s classes GEOG 67: the Politics of Everyday Life and GEOG 435: Global Environmental Justice through archival work at the Wilson Library driven by student inquiries. In Spring 2023, we started a bank of research questions shared by members of the Chapel Hill community with interests in reparations and land back from UNC to guide student projects moving forward. Our goal is that the research by students in Dr. Danielle Purifoy & Dr. Sara Smith’s geography classes will support already existing community organizing efforts related to restorative justice in the Chapel Hill area.
To make sure this work is useful to the Chapel Hill community, we invite you to share questions you have about UNC’s history so we can work collectively to hold the institution accountable. Each student project will select a community question to answer, and we would be more than happy to report our findings back to you if you share your name and contact information. We also encourage you to reach out with additional ideas you have about this project, especially if you have thoughts on how to make this responsive to Chapel Hill community needs and descendants of people who were enslaved by or had land stolen by UNC: unclandbackabolition@gmail.com.
We thank the Alliance Grant, Friday Center, Wilson Library, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research and the Office of Undergraduate Research for their generous support of this project.