Land Acknowledgement
As you put the finishing touches on your breakout session content, you may want to add a land acknowledgement. Since the LOEX 2022 Conference will take place in an event facility connected with Eastern Michigan University and Ypsilanti is located in Washtenaw County, we’d like to offer these two land acknowledgements as options.
1) EMU Board of Regents meeting documents (adapted to reflect in-person event):
We would like to acknowledge that the land we are meeting on today at Eastern Michigan University is the original homeland of the Odawa, Ojibwe, Potowatomi and Wyandot tribal nations. We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from this territories and we honor and respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land on which we gather.
2) Washtenaw Community College Land Acknowledgement (adapted to remove institutional / instructional references):
We humbly acknowledge that the location of this conference occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of diverse native peoples. The taking of this land was formalized, in a process alien to native cultures, by the Treaty of Detroit in 1807, with the Anishinaabe (ä-ni-shi-ˈnȯ-bā), including the Odawa, Ojibwe (ō-ˈjib- wā) and Potawatomi (pätəˈwätəmē), and with the Wyandot (wī-ən-ˌdät). Many other native peoples lived on this land at different times including the Fox, Sauk ( ˈsȯk ), Shawnee ( shȯ-ˈnē ), Kickapoo ( ˈkikəˌpü ), Miami (mē-ä-mē), Musketoon ( ˌməskəˈtün ), and Cherokee ( ˈcher-ə- ˌkē ).
People in Washtenaw County have benefited from the use of this land and from its life, beauty, and spirit. We recognize our responsibility to understand and care for this land, and we honor, with our deepest gratitude, the native people who have stewarded it for generations.
Acknowledgment by itself is a small gesture. But let this step be an opening to greater public consciousness of Native history, sovereignty and cultural rights, and a step toward equitable relationship and reconciliation.