Living land acknowledgements:

Who are we as social actors in the local ecosystems which hold and sustain us? Building upon the practice of land acknowledgements, an embodied approach actively engages participants through personal expression. In this talk, Jean-Luc Pierite shares his own social interventions within this framework on the scale of protests, policies, and prototypes. Deeper connections emerge from an exploration of positionality such as being a guest in another's homeland or navigating Indigenous realities in an immigrant context. Whether through art, media, or technology, centering land acknowledgements grounds the work as informed by relationships with land, human, and non-human actors. From a climate, social, and economic justice perspective, these embodied expressions foster systemic equity and reciprocity.

Traces of Indigenous history may be difficult to see beneath the bustle of present-day cities situated along the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River). Yet, many generations of Native people lived here, sustained by local flora and fauna and supported by reciprocal trade and diplomacy with their Native neighbors. During the 1600s, when Native leaders in Nonotuck (now Northampton and Hadley) invited English colonists to found a small settlement, they also attempted to preserve, in written deeds, Indigenous rights to hunt, fish, gather, and plant here in perpetuity. During the late 1600s into the 1700s, colonial warfare forced local Native communities to disperse, but they did not disappear; they folded into other Native communities in diaspora, retaining memories of lost homelands. Some Native families maintained a presence in the region throughout the 1800s, traveling familiar waterways, marketing baskets and brooms, and dispensing traditional Native medicines. These histories were, however, obscured by historical, scientific, and museological representations that, in effect, re-colonized Native peoples, living and dead. Indigenous histories can be better understood and recovered by critically analyzing colonial documents, revisiting Indigenous landscapes, consulting with living Native people, and dismantling the romantic stereotypes that pushed Native people into the vanished past.

Join Rowen for an afternoon of storytelling, inquiry, and invitation in the movement of Land and Seed Rematriation. She will share the collective vision of intercultural healing that emerges when we center Indigenous leadership, ecological knowledge, cultural memory, and sovereignty of being in living relationship with the cultural inheritance of land, seeds, and other non-human kin. She will share stories, past, present, and evolving of the pathways in the Rematriation movement towards cultural sanity in these times of great transformation.