The Sister Lakes Association brings residents together to preserve the area’s unique natural features and to foster a vital and diverse community in the surrounding neighborhoods (Lakewood, Westover, and Lakeview). The Sister Lakes Association, founded in 1970, is deeply rooted in the linked endeavors of serving as stewards of a unique natural environment while creating opportunities to build enduring connections among neighbors. The Association aims to achieve and preserve a diverse and inclusive community for living, working, playing, and aging.

The neighborhood community of Lakewood and Westover Hills occupies the unceded, ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabek – Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewadmi (Pottawatomi) Peoples, as well as the Wyandot. In offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty, history, and experiences.

We further acknowledge that the City of Ann Arbor, known as Kaagushkanick in Anishinaabemowin, stands, like almost all property in the United States, on lands obtained, generally in unconscionable ways, from Indigenous Peoples. The taking of this land was formalized by the Treaty of Detroit in 1807 and preceded by the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. Knowing the geographic and historic space we live, work, study, and recreate in does not change the past, but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing, inclusion, and justice for all individuals.

This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism in our community.