ABOVE PHOTO: New graduate from Ursinus College Maia Peele is ready to go forward in the fall as a Harvard Divinity School student. Photo courtesy: Maia Peele
By Constance Garcia-Barrio
Sudden though it seemed, Harvard University’s offer to Maia Peele, 22, of West Oak Lane, a recent graduate of Ursinus College grew from a family tradition of service and spiritual inquiry.
“My family has a nonprofit, Every Murder Is Real (EMIR), founded by my grandmother, Victoria Greene, after my uncle was shot to death at age 20,” Peele said. “Seeing it has taught me how to serve ethically, asking those you serve what they want.”
Spiritual and cultural openness also helped shape Peele’s life.
“When my sisters and I were small, my grandmother would take us to see Jewish, Peace Religion, Quaker, and other religious services,” said Peele, who has one older and one younger sister. “It made me very inquisitive and helped me learn how to talk with people.”
Peele graduated from Hallahan High School in May of 2019, and by that August she’d declared an anthropology/sociology major at Ursinus and landed work as an assistant to the college chaplain.
“I managed the office, maintained records, and helped with media content,” Peele said. “It was a paid position offered to me by Reverend Terri Ofori, my first-year advisor. I didn’t take the job thinking I would explore spirituality, but I began to learn about religions on campus and to attend religious events.”
Besides that job and rigorous studies, Peele took on volunteer work. She tutored inmates through the Montgomery County Correctional Facility GED Program.
“They weren’t serving long sentences,” Peele said. “The majority would be released in the near future. It heartened me to see them helping each other, teaching each other.”
But Peele found herself in a struggle.
“The faculty [program] manager said that the tutoring was a want, not a need,” Peele said. “We kept telling our community service coordinator that [tutoring] was what we wanted to do.” The program was suspended due to COVID-19.
Peele also served as president of the campus Rotaract Club, which brings together people 18 and older to exchange ideas with community leaders.
“During my time as president, the organization donated to diverse nonprofits, held community healing workshops, and volunteered at service sites,” Peele said.
In addition, as a mentor in the Crigler program, Peele helped guide freshmen through their first year.
“When you’re Black, poor, LGBTQ, or neurodiverse, you should be welcomed,” Peele said. “It’s not enough to shepherd such students through their first year, as happens now. You don’t just recruit them. You should work to retain them, too. That doesn’t happen on this campus.”
Peele kept busy on other fronts as well. As an anthropology/sociology intern, she assisted Clay Studio artist Adebunmi Gbadebo, a visual artist who creates sculptures, paintings, and prints that include hair from people of the African Diaspora. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art has some of Gbadebo’s sculptures. Peele felt drawn to Gbadebo’s work at the True Blue Indigo Plantation, established in Fort Motte, South Carolina in about 1700.
“I supported Gbadebo and her assistant in anthropological research and documentation,” Peele said of her fall 2022, internship. “During my internship, we drove to True Blue Plantation. Before entering the cemetery, we performed a libation ceremony and acknowledged we were on sacred land. We dug dirt in appropriate areas for clay, recorded the headstones for record-keeping, and explored the depths of the land for future maintenance.”
That’s how Peele started thinking about the MOVE bombing and the different treatment of remains from cemeteries where marginalized people are buried, she said.
“I traced the chain of custody of the MOVE remains and saw where things got sketchy,” she said.
Curious about how academic institutions treat the remains of “people on the margins,” Peele created a survey on the topic, which she sent to 100 schools as her independent study project. She looked at policies governing the possession, use, and care of non-accession human remains, that is, remains not formally entered into university records.
“The research explored how the social and historical power of museums contributes to their ability participate in …racial domination,” Peele said. “Museums set the tone for what is socially acceptable, because they hold high-status positions.”
That power can lead to an atmosphere where negligence toward the remains of Indigenous or enslaved individuals becomes acceptable, Peele said.
Peele’s research found a frequent lack of protection for the remains.
“There was no legal framework for handling the remains,” she said. “Non-accessioned human remains sometimes had no documentation of where they came from. Sometimes they lacked proper storage. There was no standard to be held to.”
Peele caught flack for her findings.
“My research is controversial because it alludes to a systematic error in anthropological practices and the discipline’s compliance governing the possession, use, and care of non-accession human remains,” Peele said.
At first, Peele wasn’t aware of the implications of her research.
“After being denied honors research the first time, I came back stronger with substantial evidence to show there is a problem,” she said. “Despite my efforts to grow my research skills, it was still not enough.”
In the end, the Rev. Terri Ofori, former college chaplain at Ursinus and Peele’s former employer, stepped in. Ofori, current dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, urged Peele apply to the Harvard Divinity School, Ofori’s own alma mater.
“It was pivotal to see someone who wasn’t family invested in me,” Peele said.
She took Ofori’s advice, and in the fall of 2022, one exhilarating event followed another. Peele accompanied Gbadebo to the opening ceremony of the artist’s exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in September of 2022.
“I got to go to the MET at night,” Peele said. “We were expressing so much joy. We were rejoicing.”
The next day, Harvard Divinity School Diversity and Explorations Program flew Peele to Boston for a three-day stay. She got her acceptance letter and full scholarship offer a few months later.
“I’m really excited,” Peele said. “I want to connect womanist theology to museums. Womanist theology is theology from the perspective of African American women. The flexibility of the [Harvard] program allows me to delve into my ideas. In the future, I see myself working in a museum or doing work that’s museum adjacent. My story is a story of growth.”
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