On land
As someone who now lives and works in the area known as Texas, I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories, here on Turtle Island.[1] I grew up in the homescapes of the Hohokam, Yavapai, O’odham, and the Akimel O’odham. My journey has also taken me through Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw lands, as well as earth tendered by the Susquehannock and Munsee Lenape peoples.
Land acknowledgments are far from enough, but they are a start to recognizing and revising the histories of this land and our relationships with it. As a scholar, teacher, and arrivant[2] on this land, I strive to engage with and cite Indigenous knowledge; to teach Indigenous histories; and to support Indigenous movements in my communities.
[1] With gratitude to UT Austin’s Committee on Land Acknowledgment and the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) for this research and language. I also join them in calling upon the University:
To repatriate the ancestral remains held by the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory to their Indigenous descendant communities and Native lands.
To commit to the active recruitment and material support of Native American and Indigenous students, who currently comprise fewer than 0.2% of UT Austin’s student body.
To support the transition of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies into a Center.
To establish a protocol of research and study on Tribal or Native lands, and to foster an ethics and practice of engaged scholarship, with and for Indigenous peoples and communities, locally and internationally.
[2] A term drawn from Jodi Byrd’s The Transit of Empire