The work of Nourishing Kin unfolds on the unceded ancestral and present-day lands of the Diné, Goshute, Northwestern Shoshone, Paiute, Timpanogos, and Ute peoples
land +kin acknowledgement
Land Acknowledgement
We offer our gratitude for planet Earth, who is our first kin and our first home. Earth One, who weaves and holds the delicate balance of life, we join our hearts to yours.
We offer our gratitude to the land of Turtle Island, where we now stand as guests, and turn our love toward the only land we’ve known as home. We turn to Antelope Island, where the origin story of the Shoshone people begins. We remember the life-giver of this place, Great Salt Lake, who is known by her Goshute people as pi’a-pa, Great Water. We remember ourselves as a lake-facing people, with a responsibility to tend this sacred watershed.
Peoples Acknowledgement
Today we are guests on the homelands of the Northwestern Shoshone, Ute, Goshute, Timpanogos, and Paiute peoples. These people lived in kinship with this part of Turtle Island peacefully for many generations until European colonizers began to travel through their territories. They were soon followed by the settlement and colonization by Mormon pioneers and settlers. Horrific violence was committed by these settlers who stole Native land and committed genocide against the Indigenous peoples of this place.
As guests in someone else’s home, we recognize and claim, on behalf of ourselves and our ancestors, our history as people of Northern European descent. We implicate our ancestors and ourselves in the ongoing terror, harm, crimes, and genocide committed against this land and her people. Through this implication we acknowledge our ancestors are directly responsible for this violence and genocide, and that we, our ancestor’s children, continue to enjoy settler privilege and occupy stolen land. We accept that we have inherited the responsibility to stop continued theft from and genocide of the Shoshone, Ute, Goshute, Timpanogos, and Paiute people and make restitution. We understand that our efforts to repair and repatriate Native land and life are accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity.
We turn toward our more recent ancestors who traveled away from their native homelands to settle Turtle Island. We acknowledge the hope and the suffering which inspired their emigration. We acknowledge the grief, the hunger, the loss, and the disconnection from home and family experienced by our emigrant ancestors. We shed our tears alongside theirs and give them a name: diaspora grief.
We recognize that alongside the difficult experiences of immigration, our settler ancestors displaced, forcibly assimilated, and killed the people of Turtle Island to lay claim to land, power, and privilege. We acknowledge that our immigrant ancestor’s suffering does not absolve their violence toward the people of Turtle Island, and that our own suffering does not absolve us of our responsibility for recompense.
We claim our mother’s mothers, our father’s mothers. We claim our mother’s fathers and our father’s fathers. We are the blood of their blood, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh. We have their eyes, their hips, their hair, their sadness and their joy. Their songs beat in the cavities of our chest, and we dance in their footsteps. We honor our bodies as a bridge from the past to the present and back again and celebrate the gift of life given by the lives before and around us.
We approach this land, this land’s people, and our ancestors with deep gratitude and humility, in full recognition of our own disconnection and ancestral wounds of diaspora grief.
Ancestors Acknowledgement
We reach toward our vast and ancient ancestral heritage which is reaching back for us. While we do not know their names or their faces, we know they are not nameless nor faceless, for we call them our Beloved, our Mighty, our Blessed Dead, and we face them each time we face ourselves and one another with goodwill, hospitality, and care. In gratitude for their sacrifices and wisdom, we join our hearts together.
We send our love to our ancestral homelands, which we might never see with our own eyes or have a chance to rest our bodies upon. We send our thanks to the land gently holding the bodies of our Beloved Dead. We offer our gratitude for the people still living in sacred relationship with our ancestral homelands, who care for and keep our ancestor’s holy places, tales, and traditions alive.
Beings Acknowledgement
We offer our thanks for the Elements: Water, Air, Fire, Earth, and Ether; to the four directional winds: East, South, West, and North. We offer our thanks to the Animal people: the Legged Ones, the Winged Ones, the Swimming Ones, the Creeping and Slithering Ones; We offer our thanks to the Tree, Plant, and Flower Beings; each of whom offer their gifts and wisdom freely; each our neighbors and friends.
Community Acknowledgement
We thank and bless our loved ones, our families and friends, whose hearts and bodies we share home with, whatever home may be or look like for us.
We join hands as we offer the gift of friendship to those present in this circle. We welcome one another as kin, and create between us a space in which we allow our grief, our pain, our joy, our imagination, our wisdom, and our hope to nourish one another. We welcome and share between us the dream of peace, life, and rest for all. In gratitude for all our kin, we join our hearts together.
This land acknowledgement was written by Channing Parker on behalf of Nourishing Kin. It was inspired by the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address shared in the book Braiding Sweetgrass, authored by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Channing acknowledges the following educators and mentors as integral to the creation of this land acknowlegement:
I am grateful for those I have learned from, who are many, who have brought me where I am today: Michelle Franzoni Thorley, who introduced me to the concept of diaspora grief and helped me understand my relationship to this land as an adoptive mother; Lupa, who taught me to understand each animal as a person; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang for their essay, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor; Audre Lorde, for rooting me in reverence of language and the power of the Erotic; Lara Veleda Vesta, for her tutelage on feminine ancestral connection and the Nordic runes; Marija Gimbutas, for unearthing ancient worship practices focused on feminine deity; Sharon Blackie, for her dissemination of women’s stories and land wisdom; Rosemary Radford Ruether, for her educational efforts focused on theological ecofeminist perspectives; Mary Oliver for teaching me to listen; and Carol Gilligan, for teaching me to trust myself again. I thank my friends and mentors, all of which are either present here today in body or in spirit through my work, and thank all of you for coming and offering your heartfelt contributions toward the dream of a different world.