CPR News published this story on Jun. 29, 2026, at 4 a.m.
Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado’s only Indigenous-serving public liberal arts college, plans to create a new interdisciplinary humanistic study laboratory. The lab will be funded by a $1.35 million humanities grant awarded to the college recently from the Mellon Foundation. The college aims to explore a “more-than-human world.”
The grant will help establish both an on-campus lab space and an online resource. The lab, called the “Laboratory for the Humanistic Study of a More-than-Human-World,” will support student projects, fellowships, and engagement with ‘community knowledge holders,’ said the school.
Fort Lewis College offers a tuition waiver to Native American and Alaskan Native citizens or children of citizens. Over one third of the school's student body qualifies for the waiver.
Megan Alvarado-Saggese, a program lead and professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, said the on-campus lab will encourage faculty from throughout the school to work more cooperatively and engage with archival and Indigenous learning methods.
“One of the beginning points for us was that there is this misconception that humanistic inquiry is limited to studying humans and their creations and that science is the outward looking field that is really able to study the natural world,” she said. “I think we have to incorporate Indigenous worldviews, because there's always been this idea of relating to the more than human world.”
The grant aims to fund student fellowships, faculty development workshops, and research support alongside the creation of the lab and online resource.
Alvarado-Saggese said there are currently no foreseeable funding gaps from what the grant provides. The money from the grant is meant to “help us develop the spaces and opportunities on campus to encourage humanistic research beyond even the timeline of the grant,”she said.
“Humanistic methods are not just about studying human history and culture in isolation,” said Cory Pillen, program lead and art history professor. “They also help us better understand our relationships with non-human others and the places we inhabit and steward.”
She said two hypothetical classes the department has considered is a course focused on Indigenous and environmental studies to explore how the threat of climate change has been communicated successfully while collective action around it has not happened and a course that would pair anthropology and environmental studies to look at conflicting ideas of wolves and their place in nature and society.
This grant “allows us to continue this research and focus on something that I think Fort Lewis has a unique opportunity to lift up, which is Indigenous knowledge,” said Alvarado-Saggese.