Fellows Feature: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner on "creativity" and conceptions of land
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (she/her/hers) is a Payómkawichum/ Kúupangaxwichem (Luiseño/Cupeño) assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. She is a first generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians in San Diego County, California. Meissner’s areas of expertise are American Indian and Indigenous philosophy, feminist and non-western epistemology, and philosophy of language.
Meissner teaches and writes about Indigenous knowledge and language systems, specifically how those systems relate to land, climate justice, sovereignty, resistance, memory, feminisms, intergenerational knowledge transmission, critical social work, and coalition-building. Currently, Meissner also serves as a consultant on trauma and resilience-informed approaches to Indigenous pedagogy, decolonizing curriculum design, and tribal child welfare projects.
As part of the newly expanded Ethics Lab Fellows Program for the 2021-2022 academic year, Meissner will be collaborating with the team for community building, curricular development, and pedagogical experimentation.
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
A Luiseño/Cupeño woman with long black hair, light tan skin, red lipstick, and a white collared shirt smiles awkwardly at the camera. She is holding a traditional chílkut, a basket cap California Indigenous women and Two Spirit relatives wear on their heads during special occasions. The basket is a brown, coil-style basket with a large star-shaped flower on the crown. She is outdoors on a sunny day and there is bright green grass in the background.
What drew you to Ethics Lab?
It was strongly recommended to me by my colleague Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. He participated last year, and he had nothing but great things to say. Specifically, he said that [Ethics Lab] is people very committed to innovative classroom design and teaching, which is my love language. So, I was really, really excited to be invited to participate.
What course, project, or publication are you excited to be working on?
I am currently in the process of designing a new class [for Spring 2022]—it’s called Topics in Anti-Colonialism. It’s really important to me to try to figure out how to implement conceptions of land, not just in the literal sense of getting outside, but also understanding the land that Georgetown occupies in ways that are responsible to relationships with Indigenous communities. And I want to be able to do that in a way that also holds space for accessibility.
One of the great things about online learning is that we’re learning so much more about access possibilities and about ways that we can innovatively adapt our classroom so that the most people possible can participate. But one of the things we lose in a lot of online work is a connection to the land and a connection to the space that so many people who come before us have had relationships with, so I’m really interested in exploring what seems like tension, but doesn’t have to be, between online learning and land-based pedagogies.
Connected in some ways to that, I’m working more broadly on a project developing a participatory community land acknowledgement process for Georgetown.
What are your thoughts on the role of creativity in the classroom?
Creativity is a weird word to me because, in Western communities, it’s really common to distinguish between something like academic learning—or whatever it is that we do in most classrooms—and creativity, as if they are some kind of a separate skill set. [...] While I think, for many Indigenous communities and non-Western communities, you see a lot more holistic approaches to what it is to learn, or what it is to express oneself. I’m not sure I could even think of a word for “creativity” in my language ['atáaxum Pomtéela], because it’s such a strange distinction to make conceptually from any other kind of expression. So, whatever it is that is called “creativity” in Western spaces is probably the most important part of my pedagogical commitments because it is a form of whole-person expression often excluded from the classroom.
I think it’s really important for students to be put in learning situations where they’re challenged to express themselves in ways that will be accessible to as many different groups of people as possible. I don’t just want my students to be able to talk about the concepts that they learned in my classroom in an academic paper, because it’s not actually often the case in ‘the real world’ that students are asked to address real questions about justice in academic papers. They’re more often going to encounter these questions in common and casual conversations or in personal reflection or therapy or prayer. They’re going to want to express pain or trauma or resilience in ways that are connected to how their spirit or emotions want to communicate, and that often requires a different kind of “skill” than what you usually get to learn in the classroom.
Self-expression, community expression, relationship-building are some of the things I like to encourage in the classroom. I’ll bring supplies into the classroom for assignments that require students to build not just temporary intellectual relationships between themselves and the task at hand, but also emotional relationships between the course materials, other community members, and themselves. Ideally, these relationships are long-lasting ones that exist outside of just the confines of the classroom and of one semester. [...]
For example, yesterday my students used acrylic paints and canvasses to express connections between the text that we had read for class, Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians, and a random quote that they had pulled from another text studied previously in the semester. I’ve noticed many undergrads are taken aback by being asked to do something that doesn’t have a lot of rules or specifications and that isn’t a five paragraph essay. I see the stress in their faces that I think a younger version of themselves wouldn’t have experienced doing a task like this. I want to be able to bring out the inner child who is able to express themselves in complicated, non-conforming ways. These activities exercise a comprehension level that I don’t think a paper alone can.
What’s something that’s inspiring you right now?
I am super, super inspired by the Toasted Sister podcast. It’s about food sovereignty and Indigenous food movements all over Turtle Island (North America) where the host, Andi Murphy, does these amazing interviews with academics, Indigenous farmers, Navajo sheepherders—all different kinds of folks who talk about their love of food and their love of the land. It’s been really inspiring because since moving to DC, I’ve really had a hard time connecting with the land. It’s a city that feels violently terraformed [...] the colonial Arcadian architecture and landscaping are anachronistic, and really out of place on Indigenous land. I feel alienated from the land here, and this podcast is inspiring because it reminds me that every piece of food you eat, all the air that you breathe, everything upon which you’re walking, it’s all still land that still has a story and relationships that we have responsibilities to—I’m not used to seeing the land in this particular urban manifestation, so this podcast has been really grounding and nourishing for me.