Shoaling: On the Engaged Humanities Network and the Practice of Disrupting Conquest
Mariah Willor
A shoal is neither land nor water. It is an underwater composite of granular material — sometimes sand, few times coral — made and moved by water currents, meaning made and moved by the moon, in conversation with the earth's molten core. A shoal is unchartable to captains. Ships unable to circumnavigate shoals may capsize. Given that the ship is the original mechanism of settler colonialism, the shoal has historically performed as physical barrier to conquest. Tiffany Lethabo King borrows this image to desc ribe what she calls "disruptions of conquest" — not only the historical act of colonization, but the ideology that survives it, living inside our maps, our museums, our language, our universities. Her shoals are untraditional ideas capable of chafing against the taken-for-granted thinking that sustains those structures: the belief that time is linear, that land is commodity, that nature is separate from the human, that knowledge is an entity to be collected and leveraged rather than tended and shared. I believe it is the responsibility of the university to, on the level of the word and research, to abdicate the power that affords them hierarchical positions to surrounding communities, through being untraditional. For Syracuse University, the Engaged Humanities Network is a hub for this work.
1. Engaged Research at SU
The Engaged Humanities Network (EHN) is a coalition of projects hailing from many disciplinary pockets of the university — English, Architecture, Film, and beyond — unified by a shared commitment to research practices that are allied with and accountable to the communities in which they are embedded. Where most institutional research treats knowledge as a universal entity to be collected, credentialed, leveraged for self-fashioning, EHN situates research within the specific networks of people, histories, and environments that give that research its meaning. It cares less for imposed academic agendas and more for pre-existing, place-based, community-rooted forms of knowing that we can access only through the strength of our relation to one another. This relational critique extends into the domain of language itself — the very medium upon which Western research depends. Poet laureate Natalie Diaz has described English as an "American lexicon sitting atop an indigenous one," a palimpsest in which one system of meaning has been layered over another, displacing it. If language is interpretive structure laid over observed experience, and the English language developed alongside and through settler colonialism, then the settler logics that translated observation into interpretation continue to live there today, masquerading as objective utterance. To lift this lexicon — releasing what our linguistic inheritance works to erase — is a practice of the EHN. In doing so, it disrupts the ideology undergirding conquest, producing shoals.
2. My Web
Like other first-generation students, raised by young parents wading through adulthood themselves, I arrived at this university with a set of histories and stories that jutted against the ones my peers exchanged. It felt as though my life before college had no relevancy in academia—if anything, it existed in opposition. I felt cartoonishly different. Cartoonishly poor. As if tugging up the pocket lining of my jeans would reveal nothing but a dead bug, some lint, maybe a piece of gum if I was lucky. I was unprepared for how much having less had influenced my worldview, and equally unprepared for how much having had shaped theirs.
As a Research Assistant for the past two years, the EHN has functioned in response to the accumulating problems I have come to recognize within academia. A funnel for every gripe. These issues are structural, presenting within every iteration of the institutional body (maps, museums, marriage, etc). Every exercise and assertion of ‘academia’ works through applying borders to knowledge and presenting an ordering context outside the ordering context itself. What constitutes a knowledge that is valuable in academia, is harder to reach if you are in any manner “untraditional” which, I’d argue most of us are. To be successful in these conditions, we have to let go/cover up those pieces of ourselves, making it strategically easier for some people to transition into college than others. Structural issues take the particular contours of Syracuse NY and ‘cuse student inherent a legacy of exaction, and must decide, what to do with it for the next four years.
What makes the project plotting themselves on the EHN’s web especially effective is its commitment to place - based knowledge: letting the political and historical life of the land inform research practices and collaboration. This shifts the pressure away from generating ceiling-shattering new ideas and toward responsibility for the community. The projects don't innovate for novelty's sake — they innovate because unique communities of people naturally produce forms that suit their own needs, not academia's. These projects can't simply be copied and pasted into another university. But the care for community that guides their methodology can be mirrored anywhere, and it's that care that makes a true network possible. On behalf of the EHN, I've written letters to a parole board, interviewed community leaders, and tabled at a food justice gathering steps away from Robin Wall Kimmerer. I've had the privilege of watching six engaged projects take shape within this network: Project Mend, Stories of Indigenous Dispossession Across the Americas, the Environmental Storytelling Series, Seeds of Story, and the Witness to Injustice exercise. They all, via their unique measures, accomplish exactly that. They’ve all forged ways of researching and writing within an alternate plane of thought, opposing the top-down funneling that academia typically values. Being co-produced between institution and community, they become especially equipped to reach their arms out around all voices and their accompanying histories, because the projects are made with them, not for them.
3. “Environmental Storytelling Series” Project Zoom-in
In plunging her hand into a jar of Haudenosaunee Strawberry Popcorns or Osage Reds, Angela Furgeson resists colonial tactics working to separate native peoples from their traditional harvest. In swishing her hand to feel the kernels cool and pearly, she resists the idea that food is object and food is for sale. Our American love for food is often one-sided, conditional: our love for a cucumber hinges on what it does for us — its taste, its calorie count — not what we do for it. Once we read "organic" and "non-GMO," our duty to the cucumber is over. In spreading the kernels as they settle into the creases of her palm, Furgeson sees the next seven generations sustained more. This is one thing we learn in the fall 2025 edition of the Environmental Storytelling Series (ESS), a multimedia storytelling initiative produced through the EHN. Furgeson, in her role as supervisor of Onondaga Nation Farm and as a member of Braiding the Sacred, facilitates the return of ancestral seeds to their homelands — a process referred to as Rematriation, a returning to the mother. Seed Sovereignty, the right of native peoples to control their seeds, is required to maintain sovereignty of any kind, and it is only facilitated through rematriation. Planting ancestrally significant corn seeds on Onondaga lands is a uniquely remarkable act in this specific geography. During the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779, burning the corn was a strategic move to starve the Indigenous population. The act of returning those seeds — in this soil, in this county — is more so political intervention than metaphor. And yet, as with so much of this work, we run again into the problem of language.
The struggle for Indigenous food sovereignty begins covertly, on a linguistic level. The term sovereignty, although it can be pushed to better suit its context, is ultimately only able to reflect Western conceptualizations of ownership and governance. Creating this sort of weighted vocabulary — sovereignty, rematriation — can prove helpful in moving ideas through academic circles, but it risks burying the animating reason, which is relationship. Indigenous food sovereignty is, beyond anything else, about the social relationship between a person and a seed. Seeds, the earth, a squirrel, a gust of wind — in Indigenous epistemologies these are felt as kin. Nothing is quite as dissociated as in our Western culture, which continuously fails to recognize the multiplicity and relationality of life. Furgeson plants, yes, for the practical reason of providing sustainable, healthy food for her community — but she also plants because her people are the seeds. Because Indigenous knowledge is relational and land-based, not having access to ancestral seeds also means not having access to ancestral knowledge.
ESS's role is to make this visible. Storytelling, as the series argues, reworks the site of symbolic violence that is the English language. The unexamined underpinnings of any structure carry the capacity to reinvigorate colonial histories, extending them to the present. Storytelling may help us contend with those histories. "Language," N. Scott Momaday writes, "is practically without limits. We are not in danger of exceeding the boundaries of language, nor are we prisoners in any dire way." Language, words, and meaning are animated and negotiated by peoples, in pockets of community. None of us are passive recipients of history. We are not simply downstream of what was done — we are active in determining what gets remembered, what gets named, what gets passed forward.
Leslie Marmon Silko believes that "the story belongs to the reader" — that a story lives within its audience, and the teller's duty is to pull it out. With this, every reading and recitation of a story is different, relying on the relationship between teller and listener. Unlike academic text, there is no single meaning one should train themselves to receive. The story produces knowledge by meeting its audience where they are. This is the goal of ESS. I worry sometimes that the price of awareness — the price of coming to a university, learning its frameworks, learning to speak its language — is paid through increased participation in the very agendas I theoretically oppose. That knowledge has made me more useful to systems, not less. The EHN is the place where I have felt most relieved of that anxiety — not because it resolves the contradiction, but because it refuses to pretend the contradiction doesn't exist. Can we think through all who are ensnared in the EHN's web as granular pieces culminating into a sandbar? Can an institution be reworked into something that disrupts conquest? What must occur to do so? How can all universities turn to coral together? Working within the network has made me feel, to put it as plainly as I know how, more human.
Acknowledgements.
I respectfully acknowledge that Syracuse University sits on the ancestral homelands of the Onondaga Nation, the Central Fire of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
References
Diaz, Natalie. 2020. Postcolonial Love Poem. Graywolf Press. King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." In Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.
Momaday, N. Scott. 1969. The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New Mexico Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1977. Ceremony. Viking Press
