Thank you to all who participated in our book club meeting. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading this book. Horribly sad, but valuable information for us to learn from.
We began the meeting with a land acknowledgement because it's important to recognize the land we are on belongs to Indigenous People. Use the link from the 11/30 post to learn more about the land you are on.
We must acknowledge with respect (as a non-Native person) that the land on which we stand, live, and learn, is the traditional territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux Peoples. The treaty of fort Laramie 1851 & 1868 along with cession 426 displaced these people and took their sacred land. In addition, hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people were slaughtered by the us government on this land during the Sand Creek massacre.
We must honor all indigenous people past, present, and future, who lived off of this land throughout generations. We recognize that government, academic and cultural institutions, our nation, stole this land and continue to enact exclusions and erasures of Indigenous Peoples.
May this acknowledgement demonstrate a commitment to working to dismantle ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, oppression and inequities, and to recognize the hundreds of Indigenous Nations who continue to resist, live, create, and uphold their sacred relations across their lands. We honor the past, current, and future contributions of the indigenous people to whom this land is sacred and recognize: this is still indigenous land.
Here are some additional resources you might want to check out:
Info/stats about Native Americans in the legal profession: https://centerforlegalinclusiveness.org/Blog/9382917
Without a Whisper: documentary describing the influence of Indigenous women on the suffrage movement
Missing & Murdered podcast about the missing and murdered Indigenous women (that should be national news but isn't)
This Land podcast about a murdered Muskogee Nation man in Oklahoma
Organizations to support: Coalition to Stop Violence against Native Women; National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center; First Nations Development Institute; American Indian College Fund; Center for Native American Youth; Indian Law Resource Center; Red Circle Project; Honor the Earth; Idle no More
