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37 YELLOW SPRINGS NEWS The GUIDE to YELLOW SPRINGS 2019 – 20 win victories for humaity PHOTO BY DIANE CHIDDISTER h students from the University of Missouri, who had protested racist incidents at that school. support each other,” on the Main Building front lawn before marching downtown. PHOTO BY COURTESY OF ANTIOCHIANA, ANTIOCH COLLEGE Mari Sabusawa, right, with fellow Antioch College student Nina Hamilton. PHOTO BY MEGAN BACHMAN Jennifer Knickerbocker, center, Antioch College’s director of foundation and corporate relations, spoke on a panel of indigenous leaders discussing water protection during Antioch’s Earth Week, April 2019, which this year centered on the theme of water. Knickerbocker is Anishinaabe of the White Earth Nation. Flanking Knickerbocker is Dayton organizer Corine Fairbanks, left, an Oglala Lakota, and Shane Creepingbear, right, of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma and Antioch’s associate director of admissions and multicultural enrollment coordinator. By YS NEWS STAFF Created in the fall of 1990 amid tension on the Antioch campus, the Sexual Offense Policy — now the Sexual Offense Preven - tion Policy, or SOPP, has evolved through - out the years, and so has the response to the policy from the wider world. On Oct. 14, 1990, two Antioch students were physically assaulted on Livermore Street. Six days later another Antioch student was assaulted in front of Deaton’s Hardware and was subsequently hospital- ized, according to a student paper from the period. Female Antioch students reacted to the assaults with a women-only “Take Back the Night” march, and a “Face And Fight Rape” discussion in the Womyn’s Center, during By MEGAN BACHMAN “We are on stolen land and we need to recognize that,” Jennifer Knickerbocker said to solemn applause at the start of a panel discussion in April 2019 during Antioch Col - lege’s Earth Week. Knickerbocker, Antioch’s director of foun - dation and corporate relations, was referring to the settler colonialism that displaced the area’s original indigenous inhabitants as part of the continent-wide U.S. policy of geno - cide of native peoples. “Yellow Springs is literally a colony,” added Knickerbocker, who is Anishinaabe of the White Earth Nation, in a later interview. “It built systems of colonization that weren’t in harmony with nature.” At the panel, indigenous leaders from the Oglala Lakota, Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, Dakota Wakpala, Northern Cheyenne, Kiowa and Anishinaabe spoke about water protection and other environmental and human rights issues. By SCOTT SANDERS During World War II, when most Japa- nese Americans were relocated to intern- ment camps, Antioch College became a place where a handful were able to continue their education. One, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, wrote about her experience in a 1944 senior paper at Antioch. She attended Long Beach Junior College and had enrolled at the University of California just a few months before Pearl Harbor. Relocation orders is how most Japanese Americans discovered that they were going to be imprisoned. Of this, Sabusawa wrote in her paper: “The term evacuation is not a difficult one to define, but it is difficult to define what the term meant to some 114,000 persons. For the first time in my life I became conscious that I was a member of a minority group. For the first time in my life I realized what it was to be an American with a Japanese face.” Santa Anita Racetrack became one of the camps, and this is where Sabusawa was interned. She wrote of the ordeal: “It wasn’t particularly easy to say, ‘Yes, I am a loyal American citizen. I will do as you command. I will pack my few belongings that you allow me to take. I will wind up my business and personal affairs in the two days you give me, I will ask no questions as to where I am going and how long I will be there.’” Sabusawa was one of about 2,500 nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) who had been attending West Coast col - leges at the time. In response, a joint gov - ernment and civic organization was formed by the War Relocation Administration and the American Friends Service Committee to help these students out of the camps and back into college. ‘Re-indigenizing’ Antioch ‘SOPP’: a practice ahead of its time The discussion was part of an Antioch effort involving “re-indigenizing the land,” Knickerbocker added at the panel. That process means honoring the land’s ancestors and decolonializing. “It’s throwing off the shackles of coloniza - tion that make us put our plants in rows and clocks on our walls,” she later said of the term. “We’ve all been colonized.” she added. That effort includes bringing more native students to campus to attend Antioch, weav - ing studies of colonization into the college’s curriculum and engaging in ceremonies and activities that acknowledge the original inhabitants and move toward healing. At Antioch’s graduation in June 2019, col - lege President Tom Manley announced that students would now circumnavigate, rather than cross, the mound next to Main Building in the start of a new, more inclusive, gradua- tion tradition. As Manley told graduates and guests, “The time has come for us to … acknowledge the indigenous origins of this land.” ♦ Over 120 colleges and universities par - ticipated in the program, scattered across 25 states, every one of them outside the restricted areas along the coast. While the Council would ultimately be the agency that helped over 4,000 internees finish their educations, it should be noted that it was also complicit in a wrongful policy. Sabusawa wrote that Antioch had been recommended to her by a friend. She was its first nisei woman student. “The friendliness of the students on the very first day was overwhelming,” she observed. "I could breathe again. I was free again. I could talk with other Americans who did not have Oriental features.”  ♦ From internment camps to Antioch which about 15 women started formulat- ing a new sexual offense policy that would require the college to hire an advocate to deal with reported cases of rape, sexual assault and persistent or insistent sexual harassment. AdCil approved the Sexual Offense Policy on Jan. 29, 1991. The policy defined “consent” as “the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexual contact or conduct,” and required the initiator of any type of sexual contact or conduct to obtain the consent of the other person or persons involved at “each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction.” Antioch received extensive national and international press coverage for the policy, most in 1993 and 1994. Ellen Continued on page 38 COLLEGE