Columbus Day isn’t on Pace’s academic calendar this year! In fact, it was removed for the first time in 2019. It’s understandable if my colleagues haven’t noticed, because the University holds classes as usual on the second Monday of October, which has been a federal holiday associated with Italian American heritage since 1937. However, let me note that Indigenous Peoples’ Day isn’t on our University’s calendar, either. As another way of remembering the settlement and colonization of the Americas, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is what a growing number of individual states and municipalities have officially renamed this federal holiday since 1990. [1]

Of course, we could choose to remember Indigenous people every day by introducing into our campus culture the convention of the land acknowledgment, a public statement that “inserts an awareness of Indigenous presence and land rights in everyday life.” [2] It names our relationship to the people whose traditional lands we occupy, and it typically includes an event- or audience-specific reflection on the meaning or challenge of decolonization in the immediate context.

Pace University is located on the unceded land of the Lenape people. We acknowledge the Lenape community, their elders past, present, and emerging, and that our work is situated on the island of Manhattan (Menohhannet or On the Island), traditional lands of the Munsee Lenape, the Canarsie, Unkechaug, Matinecock, Shinnecock, Reckgawanc and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We respect that many Indigenous people continue to live and work on this island and acknowledge their ongoing contributions to this area. This acknowledgement is part of our commitments to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy. [3]

This land acknowledgment has been developed by Dyson Associate Professor Emily Welty, PhD, who directs our Peace and Justice Studies program, drawing on the work of the Safe Harbors New York City Indigenous Collective (SHNYCIC), whose decolonizing mission for the world of theater and the performing arts starts with rebuilding our relationships to Native artists and communities. In our case, the complexity of our relations to Indigenous land begins with the displacement of the Lenape people from Pace’s environs by William Penn and other Quaker settlers in the 17th century. Their diaspora survives today as the Delaware Tribe of Nations in Oklahoma and Kansas, the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band in Wisconsin, and the following First Nations in Ontario: the Munsee-Delaware Nation, the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, and the Delaware of Six Nations. Lenape communities that have not been federally recognized include the Ramapough Lenape Nation and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey, and the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania.

Imagining what decolonization could mean at Pace has begun with our curriculum: a new course in Native and Indigenous Peoples Studies created by artist and educator Ty Defoe (Giizhiig, Ojibwe, and Oneida Nations) is now being offered every semester. It’s part of the Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies track of our American Studies program, which partners with Latinx Studies, African and African American Studies, and Global Asia Studies on campus in teaching students that critical thinking about race/ethnicity does not pursue “correct” answers, expect easy solutions, or rest on received knowledge. Together with programs such as Peace and Justice Studies, we are currently developing an Antiracist Education (ARE) core undergraduate requirement to address the educational gaps created by legislation banning critical race theory in a growing number of states.

Indigenous Studies started emerging in universities around the world in the early 2000s, and it changed how colonization was understood in the previous century. As Lorenzo Veracini explains it, “if I come and say: ‘you, work for me,’ it’s not the same as saying ‘you, go away.’ This is why colonialism is not settler colonialism.”[4] As opposed to the Indian subcontinent where the British ruled and then left, the “India” that Columbus thought he’d found in the Caribbean (or West Indies) was settled thoroughly, and the original inhabitants of the land were made to “go away” through policies of genocide and physical displacement by immigrants and forced migrants in patterns of occupation that continue in this hemisphere today.

In the words of one of my students, Janvi, an Art and American Studies double major, learning about Indigenous Studies at Pace has “expanded on my personal spiritual views. I was intrigued to learn about Mahu and Two-Spirit people, how sexuality and intimacy are respected and taught, and their views on earth and healing.” Abby, another student studying Musical Theater at Pace and taking an introduction to critical race theory with me, says that what “changed my perspective the most is learning how the US lumps Indigenous peoples into the idea of multiculturalism.”

As an example of the weighty lesson that Abby phrases with such clarity, and as an illustration of the challenge that Indigeneity poses to politics-as-usual, let me share a real exchange with a fellow professor—someone I describe as a conscientious and reliable white ally to people of color. Wanting to expand the social justice impact of our land acknowledgment, this professor suggested that we also mention our campus’s proximity to the African Burial Ground, a national monument marking the gravesites of more than 400 free and enslaved people of African descent unearthed with downtown construction in 1991. While I feel that recognizing anti-Black racism is a daily essential, I decided to encourage this coworker not to add anything to our land acknowledgment that might take the emphasis off Indigenous land rights. Even their symbolic recognition can prove controversial, disruptive, and revealing in important ways, as we learned when a recent proposal to open faculty meetings with a land acknowledgement was voted down by colleagues who worried that officially mentioning Indigenous land rights could expose our university’s real estate holdings to future liability.

Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies scholars today are more resistant than ever to blurring the distinctions between this nation’s relationship to stolen bodies and the stolen ground in which they are buried. Black and Indigenous scholars respectively have observed that an ethic of multicultural inclusion cannot hope to redress or repair the non-ontological status—or the political nonexistence—of Blackness and Indigeneity. Afro-pessimism names such a school of thought that has flourished across academia, the art world, and activist discourse, and which creates powerful conversations in Pace classrooms today. The civil society we seek to perfect, and which disproportionately fails people of color, is dependent on the ongoing colonization of Indigenous people on the American continent, in the Caribbean, and in the Pacific. These injustices are neither equivalent nor comparable, and we should question under what circumstances or from whose standpoint they can be mentioned in one breath.

While we may have retired Columbus Day from the academic calendar, we’ve also gained another symbolic holiday in the form of Veterans’ Day, which is always November 11. There’s a neat parable for American Studies here: Notice how over-determined or, in other words, how easy the shift from honoring those sacrificed in America’s wars to remembering that the frontier was the first front line, and Indianness is both alive and dead in US military culture (e.g., Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters, “in[dian]-country”).[5] What we might mistake for an abstaining silence on the status of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on our calendar turns out to be an opening for acknowledging Indigeneity daily, because as First Nations hip-hop artist Drezus (Plains Cree) tells us, decolonization is also a culture war that needs us all combat-ready.

About the author: Stephanie Hsu is an associate professor of English and program director of American Studies at Pace University; a board member of Kyoung’s Pacific Beat peacemaking theater company; an editorial collective member of the Q+ Public book series with Rutgers University Press; and a co-founding member of Q-WAVE, a grassroots organization for queer women and trans people of Asian/Pacific Islander descent in New York City.

Footnotes

1. For the first time this year, the New York City Department of Education is jointly recognizing “Italian American Heritage/Indigenous Peoples Day.”
2. “Territory Acknowledgment,” Native Land Digital, http://native-land.ca/territory-acknowledgement.
3. Thanks to Dr. Emily Welty for permission to share this land acknowledgment which draws on the work of SHNYCIC, and to Linda Chapman of the New York Theater Workshop for sharing their work.
4. Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 1.
5. See chapter 4 of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 56–77.

Header image from the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape 40th annual pow wow.

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Professor Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer delivered the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, October 6, on "Social Media and the Common Law." Dean Horace Anderson appointed Professor Tenzer as the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2019-2021 term. During the holder's term, the James D. Hopkins Professor delivers a lecture that is open to the entire law school community and members of the public.

"Social Media is the technology that connects people." Professor Tenzer opened her Hopkins lecture with this statement. The lively and well-attended lecture, with over 100 audience members in person and over 80 watching remotely, was presented in three parts. The first part covered the History of Social Media, the second discussed Social Media Wrongs and the Law Courts Use to Resolve Them, and the last covered the Benefits and Burdens of Relying on Precedent. Throughout the lecture, Professor Tenzer noted that the framers of the United States Constitution and those who created the early common law were no strangers to printed media. However, they could not have anticipated the widespread ability of average citizens to communicate instantaneously with large audiences via platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The lecture acknowledged that despite this, these early eighteenth-century laws provide an excellent foundation for resolving issues at the intersection of social media and the legal system in the twenty-first century.

Professor Tenzer concluded her lecture by noting that "while we are losing the opportunity to regulate social media through courts – and legislators and Congress have kind of dropped the ball in acting – the one good takeaway is that our judicial system is doing what it is intended to do, which is relying on cases they have decided before in reaching its new conclusions."

After the lecture, audience members had an opportunity to comment and ask questions. Many members of the audience, including numerous law students, shared their concerns. Most questions focused on the future of litigating social media claims.

Professor Tenzer's presentation centered on much of her research agenda, which focuses on regulating conduct in the digital age. Before coming to Pace, Professor Tenzer was a legislative attorney in the Legal Division of the Council of the City of New York. At Haub Law, she currently teaches and writes in Commercial Law, including Contracts and UCC Article 2, Criminal Law, Torts and Social Media Law Law. Professor Tenzer's most recent scholarship focuses on issues concerning emotional harm and the impact of the Internet on the law. In addition to her regular teaching at Pace, Professor Tenzer is the host of Law to Fact, a podcast for law students. Professor Tenzer regularly lectures nationally, most often on issues concerning Affirmative Action and Social Media Law.

The Hopkins lecture is the culmination of Professor Tenzer’s two year endowed chair title as Hopkins Professor. The title of James D. Hopkins Professor of Law is awarded to a member of the faculty for a two-year term in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. The designation is among the Law School’s most significant faculty honors. The Hopkins Professor is selected by the Dean in consultation with the former holders of the Hopkins Chair. Professor Noa Ben-Asher was appointed as the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2021-2023 term.

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The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University has received a generous five-year grant to name its Investor Rights Clinic after RealFi Financial LLC, a leading, technology-driven, alternative investment management firm. The newly named RealFi Funding Investor Rights Clinic is recognized across the country as a leader in arbitration and securities dispute resolution, and is considered one of most unique experiential learning opportunities at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law.

For the past quarter century, the RealFi Funding Investor Rights Clinic has provided students with direct legal experience under the supervision of licensed attorneys who are not only great practitioners, but also trained in individually educating and mentoring students. The clinic makes a tremendous impact on the community by providing access to the justice system to investors of modest means otherwise unable to afford representation.

Under the auspices of John Jay Legal Services, Inc., a not-for-profit legal services firm that houses and runs the clinic and externship programs at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law, student interns in the RealFi Funding Investor Rights Clinic represent small investors with claims against their brokers in arbitration and mediation proceedings before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Since its inception, more than 200 students have participated in the Clinic, reviewing hundreds of inquiries, and handling approximately 100 cases for investors. Clinic students have secured almost $900,000 in recovered funds for their clients.

“We deeply appreciate RealFi's generous gift, which will help the clinic continue to expand its important work to bring access to justice to small investors and provide our students with additional educational and advocacy opportunities,” said Professor Elissa Germaine, Executive Director of John Jay Legal Services and Director of the RealFi Funding Investor Rights Clinic.

The grant from RealFi was inspired by its Founder and CEO John C. Lettera, who is a 1999 graduate of Haub Law and also serves as an adjunct professor at the Law School, teaching Corporate Finance to upper level students.

“Much of my success is rooted in the foundation I received at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law,” said Lettera. “I have always had a passion for teaching and am addicted to the challenge of how to get students even more engaged in learning. I can’t teach every student in the world, but I can make a difference for the ones I teach. Knowing that the impact I can have on their lives can stay with them throughout their years of schooling and beyond is incredibly inspiring. Investing and partnering with Pace is another step forward in making a difference.”

Lettera is another alumni success story for the Elisabeth Haub School of Law. He has over 21 years of legal experience and over 27 years experience in real estate debt originations and acquisitions as well as equity investing. He founded and has successfully managed two financing funds worth over $100 million. At RealFi, based in White Plains, NY, he employs 16 graduates of Haub Law, building and mentoring a management team with a diverse combination of legal, financial, management, real estate, transactional and investment skills. His teaching and philanthropic commitments are among many contributions to the law school, as he generously lends his expertise on panels and his broad network for fundraising events. In 2013, he received the distinguished Haub Law Leadership Award recognizing his support.

“John’s commitment to Haub Law is an inspiring example and we are so grateful to have his support,” said Horace E. Anderson Jr., Dean and Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law. “He lends his time and resources in so many ways to the school — as a teacher, expert, mentor, connector, and philanthropist. He is truly making a difference in student’s lives and this gift will further enhance the rich educational experience of our Investor Rights Clinic to put classroom learning into practice.”

About John Jay Legal Services, Inc.

John Jay Legal Services, Inc. is a not-for-profit legal services firm that houses and runs the clinic and externship programs at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. In our clinics, students provide direct legal representation and access to justice for clients on a pro bono basis while being supervised by clinical faculty. In our externships, students work with and learn from practicing lawyers in a variety of placements tailored to their interests. These experiential learning programs offer students the opportunity to gain real-world practical legal experience during their time at Haub Law.

About RealFi Funding LLC

RealFi Funding LLC is a leading, technology driven, alternative investment management firm with expertise in real estate credit strategies. Through its subsidiaries, RealFi is an originator of qualified and non-qualified residential home mortgages. And through the RealFi REIT— a leading real estate finance company—the firm is a direct lender focused on originating commercial real estate bridge loans in major markets throughout the United States. RealFi is recognized as one of the nation's leading mortgage and asset management companies, employing hundreds of professionals and continuing to grow exponentially.

When Justin Brandon was a child, he loved to take things apart to figure out how they worked. As an eight-year-old, he got his hands on a computer and discovered that he could actually change and improve the programs. After serving in the military and working with computers in a variety of settings, Justin wanted a career where he could combine his extensive experience in computers and training. Now he’s at Pace, completing a degree in computer studies with a focus on cybersecurity and computer forensics.

One of Justin’s biggest opportunities so far has been interning in Pace’s Blue CoLab, working with teams of students who are exploring new ways to apply computer technology to protect human life. “My job involves consulting with the teams on their projects and making sure that the equipment they need—the sensors, data loggers, and water quality monitoring devices—all work together in the way that they should.” Says Justin, “They call me in to talk about the hardware, and it’s an opportunity to use my existing skills and hone new ones.”

“That experience gave me a taste of what graduate school will be like. It also taught me how to pitch my idea for a new hands-on course on white hat hacking, something I’d like Pace to offer.”

Justin also completely upgraded all of the lab’s wireless technology. And last year, he received a Summer Scholarship Grant to work with the Provost and two professors developing a new Blue CoLab curriculum that could be delivered via a remote learning platform. “That experience gave me a taste of what graduate school will be like. It also taught me how to pitch my idea for a new hands-on course on white hat hacking, something I’d like Pace to offer.”

Justin appreciates the quality of Pace’s faculty. “The instructors here have really impressive backgrounds, they work at places like IBM,” he says. “And through my electives, I’ve met professors who’ve given me opportunities to work on interesting projects outside my area, like Global Information Systems. We also have opportunities to connect with people in the industry. The Chief Technology Officer at Verizon just spoke with us about his experiences and what they’re looking for in new employees.”

Going back to school after being out in the world is challenging, but Justin says it’s worth it. “I’m learning how to collaborate with younger team members, how to be a good role model, and how to motivate others. Being at Pace has improved who I am overall.”