Acknowledgments
the collective reclamation project acknowledges the deep and ongoing labor of people from the African diaspora, enslaved Africans and their descendants, and free African communities who built, sustained, and transformed the communities we gather within today.
We recognize the histories carried through displacement and survival, and we honor the knowledge, culture, and resilience made possible through generations of work, often unrecognized, that has made possible the communities, institutions, and everyday life we now inherit.
We offer gratitude for the knowledge, culture, resilience, and contributions of African diaspora peoples, including the labor that shaped cities, economies, music, art, scholarship, and movements for justice.
We honor the strength it took to endure, organize, create, and lead across generations. We commit to remembering this labor with truth; to acknowledging the legacies of extraction and violence that accompanied it; and to acting in ways that support dignity, equity, and repair.
the collective reclamation project lies within the traditional homelands of the Tribes and Bands of the Kalapuyan peoples. Following treaties in the 1850s, the Kalapuya people were dispossessed of and forcibly removed from their Indigenous homeland by the United States government. Today, many descendants are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.
We acknowledge that we are on occupied lands, and express our respect for Kalapuya and all Tribal Nations of Oregon, and the important contributions they continue to make to their communities, to the land, and to all of us.
We recognize that a land acknowledgement is only one step in the work that needs to be done to promote Indigenous visibility and empowerment.