Content Warning: Anti-Indigenous Racism, disrespect of human remains
All across Smith’s campus, buildings bear the names of people who have, in some way or another, contributed to the college. While the type of namesake ranges from former professors to famous alums to donors, these names — and especially the names of residential buildings — are instrumental to building the sense of community Smith prides itself on. But when examining some of these namesakes more closely, a darker undertone begins to emerge.
On Mountain Day in 1904, professor Harris Hawthorne Wilder, founder of Smith College’s zoology department, wasn’t interested in partaking in the usual Mountain Day traditions. On that crisp October day, Wilder and his wife Inez Whipple, also a professor at Smith, left Northampton for Hadley. Having arrived at their destination — adjacent to an area colloquially known as “Indian Hill” — the couple got to work. After over a hundred feet of trench digging, they uncovered numerous hearth sites, fire pits, and broken fire stones, but none of what Wilder regarded as the true prize — skeletons. But while Wilder left empty handed this time, he often didn’t.
“He began to get super interested in the way Indigenous people were buried and the positions they were buried in,” said Sophia Kiang ’25, who learned about Wilder’s excavations through a class project. “He started finding burial grounds and digging them up and taking the bones out and took them to study and then put them into a museum at Smith College that he called the Zoological Museum,” she added.
Wilder used the remains to further his academic ambitions, conducting craniometric research and tissue restoration experiments on skulls he and his colleagues excavated. One such experiment entailed restoring the head of an Indigenous woman from Utah, which was then “preserved in alcohol by Prof. Wilder for two years [… until it] was in a much deteriorated condition and so he had a plaster mold of the head made which is now to be seen in Lilly Hall at Smith College,” according to the Wilder file in the Smith Archives.
Wilder’s excavations ranged from Northampton to Hadley and as far as Rhode Island. Among the graves exhumed by Wilder was the Royal Burying Ground of the Narragansett people, an Indigenous tribe whose territory encompasses present-day Charleston, Rhode Island. Tipped off by a grave marked as that of “George, son of Charles Ninigret, King of the Natives,” Wilder and Whipple spent the entire summer of 1912 excavating the surrounding area.
As of 1961, Wilder’s Zoological Museum included reconstructions of “a small tribe of Indian heads […] an impressive number of skulls, other skeletal bones, and other stone implements,” according to an article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
The collection was displayed in Smith College’s Burton Hall, but was progressively moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst between 1965 to the early 1980s. For the past two decades, through consultation with Native nations, UMass repatriated most of the individuals and relics in Wilder’s collection. Further details about Wilder’s collection, including newspaper records and field notebook accounts of specific excavations, are available through the Smith Archives.
Throughout the course of her research, Kiang was horrified both by Wilder’s actions and the lack of media coverage in the ensuing years.
“I won’t say that I was particularly surprised that we have a building named after him. I’m not shocked, it’s kind of like ‘oh wow, classic,’” she said. “[But] I was a little bit surprised that it was pretty hard for me to find information about him,” she added. “I couldn’t find any articles or statements or anything about it from Smith College or anyone who’s been to Smith College — I just couldn’t find anything about it.”
This is not a problem unique to Wilder. Just this past summer, Smith Social Work students took to action after learning that L. Clark Seelye, the college’s first president and namesake of Seelye Hall, referred to Indigenous people as “savages” and praised white settlers for creating a “prosperous and highly civilized community” during Northampton’s Quarter Millennial Commemoration in 1904.
After learning about Seelye’s words from a friend, Eviva Kahne, one of the arrangers of the protest, knew she had to organize.
“We, in all of Smith’s proclamations of anti-racism, deep anti-racist work and commitment, never once had we heard about the building that we were in for eight hours a day,” Kahne said.
Together with a group of her peers, Kahne helped make and hang banners — reading “Down with Seelye” and “SSW Reparations Now” — over what she described as the “ten foot tall portrait of [Seelye] literally hanging over our heads in Seelye Hall.”
Still Kahne said, there is more work to do. “On one hand we have to fight really hard to get this name that’s etched into the building all over — we have to fight to get that down — and at the same time it’s not enough.” She pointed to the demands of Smith Social Work students from 2015, which include diversifying course materials, hiring more faculty of color and anti-bias training, as the perfect place to start.
In the years since 2015, Smith appears to have made some progress towards that goal. In 2020, the college launched their Towards Racial Justice initiative, a series of comprehensive steps taken to advance diversity and inclusion. One such step was “[developing] principles for reviewing symbols at the college, including building names.”
The principles the college created emphasize a holistic review of the actions taken by a building’s namesake, and include a commitment to Smith’s own accountability. “Renaming should not result in erasing or sanitizing institutional history,” one principle reads. “Rather, we should make explicit and seek to address the complex and sometimes problematic nature of our growth as an institution.”
The principles also provide guidelines for renaming buildings: if concerns are raised over a namesake, a committee could be formed by the President to consider all statements and actions made by the person in question and provide a recommendation to the Board of Trustees, who hold ultimate authority over the naming of buildings.
According to Floyd Cheung, Vice President of Equity and Inclusion at Smith College, these principles have been invoked before. After this summer’s protests, President Kathleen McCartney and Provost Michael Thurston asked the college archivist, Nanci Young, to holistically research Seelye’s stances on Indigenous people to determine whether renaming was necessary.
In Cheung’s words, Young found that “Seelye was supportive of Indigenous people throughout most of his life in word and action.” A committee to consider renaming was not formed.
For some, progress has been too slow coming. “I just don’t really understand why nobody has changed [the names] yet,” Kiang said. About Wilder specifically, she added, “Why are students living in a house that is named after this man? Why are we uplifting his name?”
Leaving meaningful change up to the college’s discretion, she argues, will never work. Without the student body holding Smith accountable, nothing will happen.
“Usually people make statements about something when people know about it and get mad about it. And not enough people know about it or have gotten mad enough about it for Smith to feel like they need to make a statement,” Kiang said.
Kahne and the Social Work cohort encourage students to get mad. “What we all knew as we were gathering is that this work had to continue, and the way that it had to continue was by supporting the work on the ground of Smith undergrads,” she said. “Don’t feel that you have to go it alone. Let’s build power together.”
