Song: Land Acknowledgement | Article on How to Write a Land Acknowledgement |

Friends,

My nephew Sam and his girlfriend Lia get married tomorrow! My whole family is gathered in Dublin for the event.

I share with you a hopeful article from U.S. Catholic, about a group of nuns who are returning land to the Ojibwe Nation.

Does your congregation know where the land you sit on has come from? Who are the peoples who have been there in the past? How did it come to be in your hands? How did your community come to have the racial and ethnic make-up that it has now. Here in central Massachusetts, we were quite active in anti-slavery politics, and yet few African Americans have settled here. What is that story?

I hope you will consider finding out more. These little acts by these Franciscan Sisters are the start of something holly.

-Liz

Returning Native Lands

In historic first, Catholic sisters return Indigenous land

This act represents the first instance of Catholics in the United States returning land to the original Indigenous tribes in the name of reparations.

Before it was called Trout Lake, the nearly 4,000-acre body of water in Vilas County, Wisconsin had a different name. An Ojibwe wild rice technician dug up some old files and found the name recently—Makade’ike. It literally means the “place where they make something black,” said Biskakone Greg Johnson on a webinar in November. Johnson, a member of the nearby Lac du Flambeau Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, surmised that the black color could have had to do with mud, dye for hides, or maybe fire. “A lot of those old translations are lost to time,” he said.The lake’s Indigenous name surfaced around the same time a small portion of the land around the lake was returned to its original caretakers. In October, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration handed Johnson’s tribe the keys to their just-under-two-acre Marywood Franciscan Spirituality Center along Trout Lake. This act represents the first instance of Catholics in the United States returning land to the original Indigenous tribes in the name of reparations. Click here for the rest of the article.

Does your church have a land acknowledgement? Do you know the history of your land? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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The Native Governance Center offers guidance of how to create a land acknowledgement. While often criticized as being performative, I've found it often is a first step to learning about, and perhaps building relationships, with the indigenous people in our community.

Ed Kabotie plays the song Land Acknowledgement.

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