This is what the Rutland Herald had to say about land acknowledgement:
We have an obligation to acknowledge the land we live on here belonged to Indigenous peoples.
At several in-person town meetings prior to the pandemic, some communities or community members took a moment before the business began to make such an acknowledgement.
Educational institutions, including Middlebury College and Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, recently adopted land acknowledgments.
A land acknowledgement is a formal statement read by an institution recognizing Indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of its land. Statements are often read at the beginning of public events, but can also be included in written and electronic documents disseminated by the institution.
In Canada, the practice became common at government meetings, professional sporting events and other public events in the wake of its Truth and Reconciliation Commission report in 2015, which laid bare the country’s legacy of oppression of Indigenous peoples.
According to Gwendolyn Hallsmith, the founder of Vermonters for a New Economy and a resident of Cabot, her town voted for reparations to the Abenaki people.
“By an overwhelming majority, 73 percent of the voters at Town Meeting in Cabot offered the Abenaki people permission to gather medicine, food and art materials in the Cabot Town Forest, a parcel of land owned by the town,” Hallsmith wrote in a news release.
“White people need to work on new ways to make up for the damage we have done to Native American lives and culture,” she said. “We have not done much at all toward reparations and reconciliation for Native Americans or for Black people. It is long overdue.”
Chief Don Stevens, head of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk-Abenaki Nation, who has partnered with individuals and groups around Vermont on this important work, wrote to Hallsmith, “Cabot took the lead for this on the ballot. No other town has done that yet … views are starting to change about indigenous people in the State … If everyone took small steps like this to allow our people access to land, we could do a lot to rebuild our culture.”
He went on: “We welcome anyone to begin a conversation with us about their land.”
According to Hallsmith, similar efforts are currently underway in Hardwick and Richmond to make town land more accessible to Abenaki people.
Hallsmith’s release notes that reparations are being made by local communities in a variety of ways around the country. A new coalition of mayors called Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE) has started to plan for how reparations can be made to the descendants of slaves by their local governments. The coalition includes Los Angeles, Austin, Tallahassee, Kansas City, Providence, Sacramento, Denver, Asheville, St. Louis, St. Paul and Durham. Chicago has been making reparations for victims of police violence that include cash payments, free college education, and a range of social services. In Seattle and New York City, people are paying tribes who were displaced in their area. In New York, the American Indian Community House (AICH) collects voluntary “land taxes” in their Manna-hatta Fund.
But not all communities are willing to make such acknowledgements.
In Beverly, Massachusetts, last month, the city council there rejected a proposal (5-4) simply to read a statement at each of its meetings acknowledging that the city is built on the ancestral land of Indigenous people. The proposal was brought forward by the council president, who said reading the statement at the start of every meeting would be a way of “celebrating people on whose ancestral land we stand right now this moment.”
The proposed statement acknowledged and honored the Naumkeag and Pawtucket peoples “on whose ancestral land we stand.”
“We recognize our obligations to this land and to the Indigenous people who care for it,” the statement says. “As we work toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, we acknowledge our need to decolonize our systems by including Indigenous people and perspectives in our discourse, in our decision-making, and in our actions.”
Councilors who voted against the proposal agreed that more discussion needs to take place when it comes to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. But they questioned whether changing the city council rules was the best way to go about it. Councilors who favored the statement said it would be another step in the city’s efforts to be more welcoming and to acknowledge the country’s mistakes in its treatment of marginalized people.
Acknowledgements are not just overdue, they are required. We must own our mistakes and do what is right moving forward. Not doing so only extends our shameful behavior.
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