Land Acknowledgement
What is a land acknowledgement?
A Land Acknowledgement is a formal statement that recognizes the unique and enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.
Why acknowledge the land?
It is important to recognize and acknowledge the long history of the land and how we came to reside on it. Colonialism is a continual process, and we must be mindful of how we participate. Acknowledging the land and the Indigenous people whose traditional land it is allows the opportunity to seek deeper understanding of our place within its history.
Austin Gardens and Oak Park
Oak Park Festival Theatre’s home of Oak Park was taken primarily in Cession 78 and in part in Cession 148. The tribes as named in these treaties are “Ottawa, Chipawas, and Pottowotomees.” We acknowledge that Oak Park – and specifically our main venue of use, Austin Gardens – resides on the ancestral lands of Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi), Odawa (Ottawa), and Ojibwe Chipewa peoples. We honor them and express gratitude for their stewardship of this land.
Oak Park Festival Theatre’s mission is to “explore our shared humanity by telling stories that stand the test of time.” Indigenous peoples are not only a part of our past, but also our present and future. To ignore the colonization of this land would be dishonoring these tribes and going against our core values.
POTAWATOMI
The Citizen Potawatomi are Algonquian-speaking people who originally occupied the Great Lakes region of the United States. ushering in the American treaty era, the villages of these tribes were being displaced by white settlements by the end of the 18th century. Beginning in 1789 through a series of treaties, their tribal estate totaling more than 89 million acres was gradually reduced. The federal government continued reducing Potawatomi lands by removing them to smaller reserves in Iowa, Missouri and finally Kansas in 1846.
Today, Citizen Potawatomi Nation is one of 38 federally recognized Native American tribes with headquarters in Oklahoma. CPN is a thriving nation that is actively working to retain its culture while being a frontrunner in Native American business.
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ODAWA
Under pressure from the United States government, the Odawa (also spelled Ottawa and Odaawa) people signed treaties between 1795 and 1817, ceding much of their land. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Odawa people were moved to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma. In 1956, the United States government terminated the Odawa tribe in an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream society, ending the federal government’s recognition of their tribal sovereignty. It took twenty-two years for the tribe to be reestablished as a federally recognized government in 1978. There are about 15,000 members of the Odawa tribe living in Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oklahoma today.
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OJIBWE CHIPEWA
The Ojibwe are an Algonkian-speaking tribe and constitute the largest Native American group north of Mexico, with some 175,000 individuals of Ojibwe descent. The Ojibwe (also spelled Ojibwa or Ojibway) stretch from present-day Ontario in Eastern Canada into Montana. They were primarily hunters and fishermen, as the UP climate was too cold for farming. A few bands of Ojibwe lived in southern Michigan, where they subsisted principally by hunting. However, all had summer residences where they raised min-dor-min (corn), potatoes, turnips, beans, and sometimes squashes, pumpkins and melons.
The federal government made two major land cession treaties with the Wisconsin Ojibwe. The first was in 1837, when the Ojibwe sold most of their land in north-central Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota. The next was finalized in 1842, and the Ojibwe ceded their remaining lands in Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper peninsula. Soon, American lumberjacks fell upon the rich pine stands, and miners began to exploit the copper mines along the southern shore of Lake Superior. In 1854, the Ojibwe signed a treaty that created four of the modern-day Ojibwe reservations in Wisconsin: Bad River, Red Cliff, Lac du Flambeau and Lac Courte Oreilles.
Once the reservations were created, the Ojibwe were unable to sustain themselves by hunting and gathering, and many Ojibwe men worked as lumberjacks for White-owned companies. While lumbering brought some economic benefits to the Wisconsin Ojibwe, it also bought continued land loss. Congress passed the Dawes Act in 1887, designed to help Native people live more like Whites by dividing up reservation lands so they could all own individual farms. The land in northern Wisconsin was not good for farming, and many Ojibwe sold their land to lumber companies to supplement their wages. On some reservations, over 90% of the land passed into White hands.
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