Beaded art and shell

Research in American Indian & Indigenous Studies

The American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) is highly committed to fostering the next generation of leading Native scholars.

Being a part of the AIISP at Cornell connects you with leadership opportunities through research and community involvement. Choosing to minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) or pursue an AIIS concentration implies undertaking leadership responsibilities in Indigenous communities and/or advocacy on Indigenous issues, and shaping the field of Indigeneity through scholarship that is grounded in ethical and relevant research projects.
AIIS Academics & Research Overview
AIISP courses - Student sits on a grassy area reading a book, overlooking Cayuga Lake
Due to our commitment and contribution of important research relating to the field of AIIS, we offer our students many opportunities such as: funding for research, travel, and enrichment, plus access to a huge library of resources all year long. Additionally we are proud to support qualified students' applications to relevant scholarships and internships.

Cornell is a privately endowed research university and a partner of the State University of New York. As the federal land-grant institution in New York State, Cornell has a responsibility—unique within the Ivy League—to make contributions in all fields of knowledge in a manner that prioritizes public engagement to help improve the quality of life in New York State, the nation, and the world.

Faculty Research

Discovery. Scholarship. Impact. Cornell faculty, students, and staff collaborate in conducting research that changes the world. The Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation brings you their stories.

Learn more about the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program faculty through stories written for The Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation's Cornell Research website.

Photo of red and orange leaves in the foreground and a brick building in the background.
Red and orange leaves on campus trees in fall (photo by Jason Koski for CALS photo library).
Eric Cheyfitz
The Colonial Construction of Indian Country - Eric Cheyfitz
Headshot photograph of a man smiling wearing a blue plaid shirt.
The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ People in the Cayuga Lake Region
Photo of a man wearing a hat sitting in a view with mountains behind them.
Indigenous Communities and Climate Change

Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession Project

What being a "land-grant" university really means in regards to dispossessing Indigenous people for profit...

The history and current wealth of Cornell University is intricately tied to the Land Grant College Act of 1862, also known as the Morrill Act. Following an investigative 2020 report from High Country News by Tristan Ahotone and Robert Lee titled "Land-Grab Universities" students, faculty, and staff at Cornell formed the Cornell University & Indigenous Dispossession committee (CU&ID) to better understand and uncover the history of Indigenous land dispossession is woven into the fabric of Cornell's founding and modern wealth. This committee and committed research over recent years has resulted in multiple academic publications, graduate-level data visualization projects, digitized library collections, public lectures in both Ithaca-area and impacted communities in Wisconsin, and much more. Explore cuidproject.com for a full exploration of the project and on-going research and redress initiatives. 

PBS News Hour - Investigation reveals how universities profit off land taken from Indigenous people
Collage of historical documents and the Cornell clocktower.
Photo from the Cornell Chronicle.
An illustration of a squash with several plant names written in english and Cayuga language
Migrations 2023 Grant Awards

Troy Richardson (Philosophy), John Whitman (Linguistics), and Stephen Henhawk (Research Associate) awarded for the project: Documentation, Maintenance, and Revitalization of the Indigenous Languages of the Cayuga Lake Basin: Gayogohóno (Cayuga) and Deyodiho:no (Tutelo). Troy Richardson also awarded for the project: Reclaiming Tutelo Corn in the Indigenous Southeast.

Three boys from the short film ghosts.
Ghosts - a short film by Professor Jeff Palmer (Kiowa)

Ghosts tells the story of three Kiowa boys' daring escape from a government boarding school in Anadarko, Oklahoma in 1891, to attend a ghost dance ceremony at a distant Kiowa encampment. Ghosts is an oral history of tribal alliance, resistance, and survival from the degradation of forced assimilation. Kiowa director and Cornell faculty member Jeff Palmer directs this moving, dramatization of their escape, utilizing historical source materials (e.g., the official reports by Army Captain Hugh L. Scott, tasked with investigating the deaths) and interviews with living tribal members to produce a highly cinematic dramatization with young native actors.

Michael Charles Profile Picture
Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Land Grant Institutions: A Forgotten Debt - Mic…

In 2020, High Country News published a report called “Land-grab Universities” (Lee and Ahtone, 2020). This work brought visibility to the Morrill Act of 1862, the source and scale of distributed “public domain lands” to endow land grant institutions and connected these parcels of land with named Indigenous communities who were initially displaced from these areas. This dataset offered an opportunity for the Charles Research Group to expand on the role that Indigenous Dispossession plays in the endowments of Land Grant Universities and explore the impacts that the Morrill Act continues to play on Indigenous food systems. Utilizing national datasets on food security, temperature, precipitation, and food productivity indices, we aim to quantitatively contribute to the story of Indigenous displacement and Land Grant Institutions through a lens on Indigenous food systems. The team has developed a tool that enables users to explore and map out the effects of dispossession on food system-related metrics, comparing metrics associated with the 11-million acres distributed to 52 institutions and today’s federally-recognized Tribal lands. The data is labeled to filter and calculate impacts for a particular Tribal Nation or the sum of impacts for a specific institution. Although the metrics are imperfect and do not capture the effects of brutal histories and impacts on cultural values, we believe that this data-driven approach can empower Indigenous communities to advocate for themselves as sovereign nations and encourage Land Grant Institutions to grapple with their own histories and develop plans to understand what truth and reconciliation might look like on their own campuses.

Additional Faculty-Led Research

Charles Research Group - Community building through computational methods - Dr. Michael Charles (Diné/Navajo) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering. The Charles Research Group is particularly interested in the vital role that landscapes can play in addressing complex sustainability challenges and how ecosystem services promote well-being to the human population. The dynamic interactions between these social, ecological and technological elements across space and time continue to provide interesting research challenges in the modeling, simulation, and optimization of such systems.

Understanding the limits of computational approaches, the Charles lab is also committed to working with communities of practice (non-academic communities) to explore how computational results can lead to transformed behavior, practice, and policy. Particularly, we are interested in building relationships and collaborating with Indigenous Nations as we can explore the interface of multiple knowledge systems (i.e. institutionalized science and Indigenous knowledge) and work directly with community leaders or Tribal governments to execute any community-determined actionable steps. These relationships also lead to research projects that aim to meet community-identified needs, broadening the applications of the computational approaches developed in the lab.

“Reconceptualizing Haudenosaunee Studies” aims to advance Haudenosaunee studies in linguistics, anthropology/archaeology and art/history of art while changing long-dominant methods in the field. Foregrounding involvement of community members and knowledge keepers, particularly Stephen Henhawk, research associate in linguistics (A&S) and program associate in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the researchers will focus on Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ (Cayuga), the indigenous language and people of the Cayuga Lake region, while touching all the Haudenosaunee nations and the diaspora into which many Haudenosaunee people have been driven. Research goals include revision of the stereotyped “polysynthetic” characterization of Haudenosaunee languages; rewriting the narrative of the long-term Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ habitation in the region; and re-inscription of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫɁ physical presence here. The project is led by John Whitman, professor of linguistics (A&S); Kurt Jordan, professor of anthropology (A&S); and Jolene Rickard, associate professor of history of art and visual studies (A&S).

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists - Dr. Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) - Women have long been the creative force behind Native American art, yet their individual contributions have been largely unrecognized, instead treated as anonymous representations of entire cultures. Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark exhibition is the first major thematic show to explore the artistic achievements of Native women. Its presentation at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery includes 82 artworks dating from antiquity to the present, made in a variety of media from textiles and beadwork, to sculpture, time-based media and photography. At the core of this exhibition is a firm belief in the power of the collaborative process. A group of exceptional Native women artists, curators, and Native art historians have come together to generate new interpretations and scholarship of this art and their makers, offering multiple points of view and perspectives to enhance and deepen understanding of the ingenuity and innovation that have always been foundational to the art of Native women.

Graduate Level Student Research

Cornell has supported graduate students in the field of American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) since 1950. AIIS students have shifted national knowledge and understanding of Indigenous languages, Haudenosaunee forest management, agricultural and scientific knowledge, textile histories, food science, and law. Explore Our Alumni page to see more than half a century of Indigenous scholars shifting the landscape of their respective fields, and explore our News page, and the links below for projects by current students. 

Genetic modification can improve crop yields — but stop overselling it

September 20, 2023

Merritt Khaipho-Burch (Thai/Oglala)

With a changing climate and a growing population, the world increasingly needs more-productive and resilient crops. But improving them requires a knowledge of what actually works in the field.

Genetic modification can improve crop yields — but stop overselling it
Photograph of a large green field of maize with a brown dirt road running through the middle.
Maize fields near Londrina in southern Brazil. Credit: Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg via Getty
About thirty shucked ears of white corn are braided together into one bundle, and lay spread out on a table.

Additional Student Research Projects

Thousands of bushels of corn

In 1779, President George Washington ordered a scorched earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The campaign destroyed vast quantities of vegetables, forty towns, and thousands of bushels of corn. This genocide displaced several Haudenosaunee communities, including the Cayuga Nation, from their homelands surrounding Cayuga Lake. Two hundred and fifty years later, the Cayuga return.

Waylon Wilson is a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation and an AIISP graduate student focused on re-storying Indigenous history and issues in multiple media platforms. As a digital media artist, he is relocating Indigenous place-based knowledge as mobile, virtual environments, laser-cut fabrications, and quirky animations. He builds interactive, intergenerational digital spaces for elder and youth play. His current research interests examine the intersections of Indigenous storytelling, documentary filmmaking, cinema techniques, and video game strategies.

Thousands of bushels of corn
Image of video game style barrels stretched out as far as you can see which represent bushels of corn
Screenshot from Thousands of bushels of corn video game.

Undergraduate Student Research

Peter Thais (Kanien:keha'ka/Mohawk), a rising senior undergraduate student studying Biological Engineering with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, placed 2nd in the undergraduate oral presentation research category at the American Indian Science and Engineering (AISES) National Conference in spring 2024. His presentation titled “Impacts of Dispossession on Indigenous Food Systems that Benefitted Land Grant Universities”, highlighted a novel dataset that is extending previous data from “Land Grab University” (Lee and Ahtone, 2020) to include metrics such as food productivity and production potential compared between current federally recognized Tribal land and land that founded university endowments associated with the Morrill Act of 1862. This project was done in collaboration with the Charles Research Group at Cornell led by Professor Michael Charles (Dine/Navajo).

A young man with long black hair wearing a black button down shirt with geometric patterns gestures as a poster titled Peter Thais (Kanien:keha'ka/Mohawk), a rising senior undergraduate student studying Biological Engineering with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Two other individuals with their back to the camera are listening intently.

Peter Thais (Kanien:keha'ka/Mohawk) '25 presents on 'Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Land Grant Universities: A Forgotten Debt' at the Summer Research Symposium in August 2024.

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