Welcome to the 2023 Yale Daily News Indigenous Heritage Month special issue, celebrating the presence and emergence of the Native and Indigenous community at the University. This issue is dedicated to our Indigenous student leaders — who advocated for this issue’s publication — and to the Native American Cultural Center, which since its inception has been a pillar of institutional support for our student community. 

This special issue is a labor of love stewarded from and to the Native and Indigenous student community. Thank you to our guest contributors from within our community who have poured their time and effort into creating content for this issue. Thank you to the members of the News — including reporters, desk editors, copy editors, the production and design editors, the DEI committee, audience editors, photographers, illustrators, and Management — whose work ensured that this issue came into fruition and provided this community a platform to share our ways of knowing, our issues and our sovereign lives as members of the University. 

The News is the nation’s oldest college daily — an epithet which reflects the News’ history of reporting and the power  of our stories . Yet, it was 142 years after the publication’s founding and 110 years after the graduation of Yale’s first Native undergraduate, Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago), that the News finally in 2020 created a special issue for the Native and Indigenous communities of the University.

As reverberated by three recent introductory letters in Yale Daily News special issues celebrating Latinx History Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month and Black History Month, the News has fallen incredibly short in substantively and accurately representing people of color — it goes without saying that this is a shared experience of the University’s Native and Indigenous community. The most recent Yale Daily News demographics report, from spring 2023, reflected zero staff members who identified as either Native or Indigenous last semester. While there have been some Native and Indigenous guest contributors in the past, there has historically been no stronghold of representation within the News’ staff. 

This issue is a testament to the small yet powerful genealogy of the University’s Native and Indigenous community. In this issue, readers will find that this past month has been one of prolific contributions from our community — across students, faculty and alumni — who are beacons of inspiration and standard bearers for our generation of Native and Indigenous students. At the beginning of November, Jairus Rhoades ’26 (American Samoan), among other members of the Indigenous Peoples of Oceania, hosted a benefit concert to support relief efforts for the wildfires that devastated Maui in the summer — the deadliest wildfires in modern United States history. The next weekend, the Native American Cultural Center both celebrated its decennial anniversary and hosted the sixth annual Henry Roe Cloud conference. On Nov. 15, American Studies and history professor Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) won the nonfiction National Book Award for his book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples And The Unmaking of U.S. History.” November concluded with weeklong programming from the Indigenous Peoples of Oceania in honor of Lā Kūʻokoʻa, or Hawaiian Independence Day, on Nov. 28; that programming featured lei-making and panels with guests prominent in Hawaiʻi Sign Language, Native Hawaiian scholarship and political activism. 

Over the past month, I have bore witness to what is not only a community committed to unstitching history, but many generations committed to restitching history. Native and Indigenous authorship will continue to be a gateway to tell our history on our own terms, and this gateway will certainly not close with this special issue.  

On behalf of the News, I welcome any feedback. Please send any comments to editor@yaledailynews.com, or to my individual email address below. 

With gratitude and love to Yale’s Native and Indigenous community, 

Connor Arakaki ’26 (Kanaka Maoli)

University Reporter