“We want to create spaces where many different constituencies can begin difficult conversations and hopefully begin to work things out through creative processes.”
This summer, University of Washington professors Jessica Bissett Perea, Tony Lucero, and Ben Gardner sat around the Simpson Center seminar table for a moment of collective awe. “It’s already happening,” Gardner said of a meeting they had just had with the visiting artists who will participate in their project, Not Apart: Indigenous Knowledges and the Art of University-Community Repair (Indigenous Arts). He explained, a group of faculty “and four Indigenous artists coming together to rethink the relationship between colonialism, knowledge, and the university . . . that is extremely rare.”
Bissett Perea, Lucero, and Gardner are Co-Principal Investigators (Co-PIs) on this year-long project, a Sawyer Seminar devoted to the theme of academic freedom and democracy within the university. While they come from different departments and study different regions of the world, they share a desire to interrogate university norms. Some of these norms include how decisions are made, relationships are formed, communities are engaged, and memorials are built. Gardner, who is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at Bothell and an adjunct faculty member in Geography at Seattle, described the project as offering opportunities "to question the unquestioned, to take apart the common sense, and to maybe put it back together differently.”
The title of their project, Not Apart, responds to a set of four large-scale murals in the Suzzallo Library’s Smith Room, and specifically to one that depicts the Washington territory being “set apart” from Oregon in 1853 in service of manifest destiny. The mural prioritizes colonialist and imperialist land acquisition and border creation over Indigenous lifeways of interconnection and relationality.
With the mural as their provocation, Bissett Perea, Lucero, and Gardner developed a vision for how they might bring together Indigenous artists, tribal leaders, community members, and scholars from North America and the Global South to examine how Indigenous ways of artmaking and knowledge-sharing can build a more just, accountable, and democratic university. The Not Apart title signals meanings resonant with Indigenous values and lifeways. The university is not apart from the lands and communities which it occupies. Indigenous studies are not apart from the study of other racialized or minoritized constituencies in the United States and elsewhere. And the arts are not apart from the various intellectual, political, and economic aspects of the university and the communities to whom it is responsible.
Whereas universities often emphasize outcomes when considering scholarship and the advancement of knowledge, Indigenous communities and practices put equal, if not greater, emphasis on relationships and process. How the knowledge is produced is, in some cases, more important than what is produced. And the “how,” in Indigenous cultures, is often holistic, synergistic, and relational. Bissett Perea (Dena’ina), who is a musician-scholar of Arctic lifeways and arts practices, and an associate professor of American Indian Studies with adjunct appointments in Music History and the Comparative History of Ideas Program (CHID), makes clear that “Indigenous arts and Indigenous knowledges show us how everything is connected.” As a newer faculty member at UW, she has been working to learn about the institution’s history and the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty. She believes there is a real need to think deeply about what the university does and what it is for. Bissett Perea also believes that the arts “show us how what’s good for Indigenous people is good for everyone.”
While the team recognizes the real need for repair, they see UW as uniquely positioned to host a project like this because of the strength of its Indigenous studies programs and various entities on campus who uplift Indigenous arts, knowledges, and communities. Some of these, like the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies (CAIIS), Critical Acts Research Group, and Living Breath Collective, will participate in the project's events and activities. Not Apart also builds on important student work, like Owen Oliver’s Indigenous Walking Tour, which he produced as an undergraduate and that works to educate people about Indigenous people’s presence and resurgence on campus and beyond.
Lucero, who is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS), chair of the Comparative History of Ideas Program (CHID), and has adjunct appointments in Geography and American Indian Studies, sees reflections of Indigenous epistemologies at work in the department he chairs. He shared the story of Mateo Quispe, a CHID graduate and Washington Poet Laureate, recently featured in UW Magazine. Quispe described CHID as “the closest thing to an Indigenous epistemology” that he experienced at the university, explaining that in CHID courses he learned that math is not separate from the arts but interwoven with them. Lucero believes “that’s the not-apart kind of idea. That many ways of seeing, many worlds can fit together.”
Throughout this year-long endeavor, Indigenous Arts, the shorthand title of the project, will share and amplify this perspective. Engagement with the arts, the team emphasizes, encourages people to move beyond intellectual contemplation, the practice long prioritized by many academics. Importantly, “the focus on Indigenous arts isn't exclusive to Indigenous communities,” Gardner explains, “Indigenous arts are a way of seeing and being in the world . . . We want to use art to get people in the university to look back at themselves . . . in ways that are embodied, and not just in books.”
The team has engaged four visiting artists to both guide and support their interrogation of university practices and their aspirations to foster a more democratic institution:
- Daniel R. Smith (Swinomish) is a Seattle artist, graphic designer, and design curator. Daniel is leading the Spot Reservation event – a performance and land art installation on October 30th in Seattle and November 5th in Bothell.
- Kariel Galbraith (Tlingit) is a multidisciplinary artist working across creative writing and fiber arts. Over the duration of the 2026-27 academic year, Kariel will facilitate potlatch practices, an Indigenous tradition of gift-giving, generosity, and reciprocity, to redress harms and grief caused by UW on Native communities.
- Rena Priest (Lummi) is a poet, playwright, and essayist who served as the sixth Washington State Poet Laureate from 2021-23 and was the first Indigenous person to be appointed to that role. Rena is developing a play, “Touristed,” that explores how university knowledge is produced and what the hidden costs are for local communities.
- Camas Logue (Klamath) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, carving, printmaking, weaving, and performance. Camas will facilitate a collaboratively designed and carved cedar panel to be placed somewhere on campus in fall 2027.
The Not Apart project is structured in a way that is intentional, moving from inside the university to the broader Seattle community, and eventually toward a global community. It is also flexible, with room for the resident artists and their work to guide the year’s activities. Each quarter, one on-campus and one community event will take place related to the artist-in-residence. In addition, the Co-PIs will teach a microseminar for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. In October, in addition to Smith’s Spot Reservation and artist talk events in Seattle and Bothell, the team will host Eve Tuck, in partnership with the Simpson Center, as the Fall 2026 Katz Distinguished Lecturer.
Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) is the James Weldon Johnson Professor of Indigenous Studies at New York University. Much of her research centers on Indigenous social thought and feminisms, land-based education, social movements and policies, and decolonization. Bissett Perea says that Tuck is “someone who models how to ask really difficult questions” about ways of teaching and the involvement or disenfranchisement of students. She expects that Tuck’s lecture will take an "invitational approach" by leading with a topic – writing – that resonates beyond academia. An invitational approach is one that draws people into better relation with one another. Bissett Perea explains that it is an approach quintessential to Alaska Native lifeways, and more broadly Indigenous cultures, and a key tenet of Not Apart. She says, “we want to create spaces where many different constituencies can begin difficult conversations and hopefully begin to work things out through creative processes.”
After delivering her lecture, Tuck will participate in an on-stage conversation with Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan), associate professor of American Indian Studies here at UW. Lucero says that Million’s work has been “incredibly transformational in opening up space for both affect and embodied forms of knowledge.” It will be one prominent Indigenous studies scholar illuminating the work of another. Tuck’s lecture will be the first Katz lecture to be held at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House — and likely the largest yet, as pre-registration has filled.
The Not Apart team sees their project as “a collective of collectives” as the artists will bring with them their own histories, worlds, and communities. One of them, Camas Logue, will serve as a formal witness for the full year of programming. In many Indigenous cultures, and specifically potlatch cultures across the North Pacific, witnesses are appointed during historic moments and events to be the keepers of knowledge and to help pass that knowledge and history on. It is the team’s hope that Logue's cedar panel project will be a Coast Salish-led way of documenting the team’s intentions and practices during the year, as well as asserting their commitments to carrying the work forward. In Logue’s view, the long-lasting nature of the panel will invite everyone who passes it to acknowledge, “This land remembers. We are not apart. We are responsible.”
Bissett Perea, Lucero, and Gardner recognize the long and slow nature of transforming universities, institutions rooted in deep histories of colonialism and imperialism. Their belief, consistent with Indigenous values and lifeways, is that real change will not come from the top but will be built from the ground up through working with communities, students, artists, and activists. The project aims to ignite change that will continue beyond the life of the grant. By creating unexpected gatherings and bringing people together who might not otherwise share time and space, the team believes they can shift hearts and minds, and move toward repair.