Land Acknowledgement
The following acknowledgment was adapted with kind permission from one authored for use in the wider Ohio region by Shane Creepingbear (Kiowa) in collaboration with Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe based in Miami, Oklahoma. Other contributors include Dawn Knickerbocker (Anishinaabe), and support from the Urban Native Collective (UNC) of Cincinnati.
The Dodge is a literary magazine based in Wooster, Ohio, at the College of Wooster. Please join us as we recognize and acknowledge that the College of Wooster was built on the Indigenous homelands of the good and many people of the Shawnee, Miami, and other Iroquian, Souian, and Algonquian bands. Today we are gathered on the unceded lands of these historic bands and Nations. We ask you to acknowledge these communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. We are obligated to educate each other with accurate information about the history of this land.
A land acknowledgment is an important path and a first step to dismantling racial and colonized oppression within our spaces. Indigenous Nations have always formally welcomed and acknowledged land territories when hosting visitors and when traveling to neighboring communities. The land is not merely space that bodies occupy; it is a depository of culture, story, history, and tradition, and it is with these traditions in mind that we reflect and center ourselves and our thoughts toward respect.
Please join us as we acknowledge and honor that the word Ohio comes from the Iroquoian word ohi-yo’, for “good rivers” and was a place of gathering and ceremony, trade and exchange, food growing, sharing and story, and respect for culture. The Iroquoian-, Siouian-, and the Algonquian-speaking peoples are still here. We can never separate the people from the land–for this land longs for its people. We acknowledge the ancestral homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Seneca, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Wapakoneta. Over 39 historic Nations and bands call this land home. Today we are gathered on the land that was unceded and stolen. We ask you to acknowledge these communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations.
We are committed to the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
We acknowledge that this place was founded upon exclusions and erasures of Indigenous knowledge about how to care for these lands.
We are obligated to support and educate each other with accurate information about the true history of this land.
Decolonization means that we will strive to be in service of the water and the rivers and the animals in relational solidarity with them. And as people now on this land we must do what we can to provide nature and wildness with protection and defense.