Land Acknowledgment
HRI Land Acknowledgment Statement
At HRI we respectfully acknowledge that we are on the lands of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations. These Nations were forcefully removed from their traditional territories and these lands continue to carry the stories of these Nations and their struggles for survival and identity. As part of a land-grant institution, we have a particular obligation to recognize the peoples of these lands and the histories of dispossession upon which the university rests.
In keeping with the spirit of land acknowledgment statements, we also recognize that these histories are both shared with and distinct from those of African American, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, among others.
As humanists we recognize that the past is not past, and that no field or arena of inquiry is exempt from the responsibility of addressing the legacies of settler colonialism, enslavement, and their contemporary manifestations well beyond acknowledgments such as this.
Thus, this statement is a demonstration of our ongoing commitment to supporting the work of Indigenous scholars and communities. It is also a reminder of how accounting for Indigenous erasure and survivance makes visible the urgency of imagining change as collaboratively and collectively as possible. Let us, then, together envision what Muskogee Creek/Cherokee poet Joy Harjo calls “a map to the next world.”