Search

The Stepping Out and Stepping Up (SOSU) Native American Racial Justice Project initiative, developed in partnership with First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), was designed to address the dispossession and sale of tribal lands used to establish the Ohio State University. This work was inspired by the publication of the "Land Grab Universities Report" (Lee & Ahtone, 2020), which provided exact details regarding amounts of land taken from specific tribal nations and meticulously documented the circumstances surrounding the dispossession and the sums of monies raised in the sale of each parcel that was used to fund 52 Land-Grant universities through the 1862 Morrill Act. According to the "Land Grab Universities Report," more than 100 tribes experienced the dispossession of over 640,000 acres of land that were provided to the state government of Ohio to establish the Ohio State University. This article focuses on the SOSU activities centering on the viewpoints of the leaders of those tribal nations whose land was seized and sold to help found the Ohio State University. It reports on the results of the first 12 interviews conducted with the leaders of current tribal nations. It is the authors' hope in writing this article that it will launch a process across all Land-Grant universities whereby it can honor the spirit of a statement made by one of the tribal leaders: "Let us tell the story of our land and place." In so doing, they wish to create a platform that supports the advocacy for reparative activities such as the investment in 1994--1862 Land-Grant partnerships addressed in a previous article (Williams, Gavazzi, Roberts, et al., 2021). [For the previous article, "Paying Old Debts," see EJ1345435.]

Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual can accomplish alone. Group coordination often brings to mind synchrony and alignment, where all individuals do the same thing (e.g., driving on the right side of the road, marching in lockstep, or playing musical instruments on a regular beat). Yet, effective coordination also typically involves differentiation, where specialized roles emerge for different members (e.g., prep stations in a kitchen or positions on an athletic team). Role specialization poses a challenge for computational models of group coordination, which have largely focused on achieving synchrony. Here, we present the CARMI framework, which characterizes role specialization processes in terms of five core features that we hope will help guide future model development: Communication, Adaptation to feedback, Repulsion, Multi‐level planning, and Intention modeling. Although there are many paths to role formation, we suggest that roles emerge when each agent in a group dynamically allocates their behavior toward a shared goal to complement what they expect others to do. In other words, coordination concerns beliefs (who will do what) rather than simple actions. We describe three related experimental paradigms—"Group Binary Search," "Battles of the Exes," and "Find the Unicorn"—that we have used to study differentiation processes in the lab, each emphasizing different aspects of the CARMI framework. Group coordination often brings to mind group members synchronizing their behaviors, as with soldiers marching in lockstep or audience members spontaneously clapping in unison. However, effective coordination often crucially involves a division of labor in which different members come to adopt different roles. The emergence of specialized roles in the three collective behavior paradigms we review can be understood in terms of five interactive processes: communication, adaptation to feedback, repulsion among member strategies, multi‐level planning, and intention modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1862, the U.S. House of representatives granted land to states for the express purpose of supporting the development of public universities. In turn, states were given the responsibility for providing the land upon which these universities would be built, as well as contributing monetarily to their ongoing development. Known as the Morrill Act, this congressional action was designed to support at least one institution of higher learning in each state that would offer access to an affordable and practical college degree, opening the door to the American dream for the "industrial classes." However the publication of the Land-Grab Universities report (Lee & Ahtone, 2020) blew the doors off the central narrative surrounding the foundation of America's original Land Grant universities. The compendium provided exact details regarding amounts of land taken from specific tribal nations and meticulously documented sums of monies raised in the sale of those territories. In short, the bill designed to create public universities in each state-- sponsored by Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln--gave away territories taken from Native nations typically by brute force or lopsided treaties. Sparked by the Land-Grab Universities report, a faculty and staff group from the Ohio State University (OSU) created the Stepping Out and Stepping Up (SOSU) racial justice project to address the dispossession and sale of tribal lands used to fund the establishment of OSU. The SOSU initiative was developed in partnership with First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), the largest Native-controlled economic justice organization in the United States that provides economic development assistance, research, and advocacy for reservations and tribal communities.

We propose an agent-based model of group foraging, EPICURE, for patchily distributed resources. Each agent makes probabilistic movement decisions in a gridworld through a linear combination of current perceptual information […]

When people make choices within a group, they are frequently influenced by the choices made by others. We have experimentally explored the general phenomenon of group behavior where an early action facilitates subsequent actions. Our concrete instantiation of this problem is group path formation where people travel between destinations with the travel cost for moving onto a location inversely related to the frequency with which others have visited the location. We compare the resulting paths to optimal solutions [minimal Steiner trees (MSTs)] and the "Active Walker" model of pedestrian motion from biophysics. There were systematic deviations from beeline pathways in the direction of MST. These deviations showed asymmetries (people took different paths from A to B than they did from B to A) and varied as a function of the topology of the destinations, the duration of travel, and the absolute scale of the world. The Active Walker model accounted for many of these results, in addition to correctly predicting the approximate spatial distribution of steps. Index Terms--Conformity, culture, group behavior, group choice, minimal Steiner trees (MSTs), path dependence, route formation, stigmergy, trail systems.