News and Events

Day one of our two-day symposium featured panels, a keynote, and reception at the Museum of African American History. Day two of our two-day symposium featured a plenary, keynote, special performance, and more at the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center.

In 2023, the inaugural Reparative Partnership Grant Program was launched, which supports innovative, achievable projects that address systemic inequities affecting descendant communities, with a strong focus on the Boston and Cambridge communities and regional Tribal communities. To spark collaborations and connections between community-focused nonprofits and members of the Harvard community, the Initiative hosted a series of "Ideathons" within the local community that provided a space for interested grant applicants to brainstorm, learn from each other, and gain valuable insights.

This conference, “Responsibility and Repair”— led by Harvard University’s Native American Program in collaboration with Harvard Radcliffe Institute — brought together Native and university leaders to advance a national dialogue, expand research, and establish and deepen partnerships with Indigenous communities. Using the landmark Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (2022) as a starting point, the conference and its participants — activists, scholars, Native leaders, tribal historians, and others — explored the responsibility of universities to confront their past and recommended steps toward repair that is often centuries overdue.

Over the past two decades, universities around the world have begun to engage with their legacies related to slavery. Many have issued reports detailing some of their historical ties to slavery, the substantial financial benefits the institutions and their affiliates extracted from slave economies, and universities’ intellectual contributions to racist ideologies and practices. At the same time, this research has uncovered a long history of African American resistance, and we are just beginning to address the impact of legacies of slavery on Black students at these institutions into the 21st century. With this history uncovered, we must now ask: What must institutions of higher education do? What types of repair work can and should we undertake? We will explore these questions in our conference through discussions about a range of topics, including engagement with descendant communities, legacies of slavery in libraries and museums, and novel public engagement and educational opportunities.