How historical inquiry and collaboration can guide Harvard toward accountability and long-term change
By Julita Bailey-Vasco | October 9, 2026
Philip Deloria is one of six advisors on the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS) Initiative’s Advisory Council. Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, has authored several books and numerous articles. His research focuses on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of Indigenous peoples in a global context. Deloria has been an instrumental thought partner in guiding the H&LS Initiative’s efforts to support descendant communities.
Deloria recently joined the six other advisors and shared his personal reflections on the H&LS Initiative’s work, his vision for it, and his hopes for the future.
Julita Bailey-Vasco: Why is the work of Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative important to you? Why is it important for Harvard University to do this work?
Philip Deloria: Every institution needs to think seriously about its past—not only its achievements, but its less laudable histories. We—the people of the present—are not responsible for the actions of our institutional predecessors. We were not there. But we are accountable to those histories, which means we need to understand them, and understand the ways that the injustices of the past have helped produce the present in which we live and operate.
Bailey-Vasco: What is your vision for the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative and what impact are you hoping the Initiative will have long-term?
Deloria: When we think about our institution over the long term of its existence, we can see that even as many people have enjoyed its blessings, many others have suffered consequences. If we are truly accountable to our histories, then we will want to engage in acts of repair—and that can take many forms, even as it can never fully compensate for those painful consequences. But to apply humanistic values to our institution—as we do—is to commit to making an effort, to doing our best to take accountability and to take some form of action. That, it seems to me, is the vision of Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative.
Any institution taking up this kind of work has a responsibility to benchmark what others have done, to learn from their missteps and advance their successes. While our histories have inevitable overlaps, we must account for the specificities of our own past.
Philip Deloria
Bailey-Vasco: The Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s Advisory Council is composed of eminent scholars and historians. Can you talk a bit about your own expertise, the broader expertise of the Council, and how it’s helping guide this work?
Deloria: It is an honor for me to be serving alongside an extraordinary group of scholars and thinkers. My own interests lie specifically with the experience of Native American people who were enslaved by members of the Harvard community. The practice of Native enslavement was widespread in the early years of New England settlement, and Harvard itself was entangled with Native lands and communities in countless ways. This, too, is part of the story—as witnessed by the discrete chapter in the 2022 Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery that details this particular history.
Bailey-Vasco: What’s the one thing you would like the broader community – at Harvard and beyond – to know about this Initiative?
Deloria: That, like all things, it is a work in progress and will continue to be—but that the programmatic initiatives and the work to date evidence a commitment on the part of Harvard to thoroughgoing rigor in understanding our history and creative collaboration in addressing the numerous possibilities for moving forward.
Bailey-Vasco: What can we learn from other institutions that have embarked on the journey of reckoning with their ties to slavery?
Deloria: Any institution taking up this kind of work has a responsibility to benchmark what others have done, to learn from their missteps and advance their successes. While our histories have inevitable overlaps, we must account for the specificities of our own past. So, we are always threading the needle between comparisons to others and feeling our way through our efforts here at Harvard. One of the things I bring to our table is a long history with Native American repatriation efforts. It’s distinct: an angular set of experiences and knowledge—but I’m often surprised by the ways that some of the questions we ask prove familiar to me from some of my earlier work.