With centuries of neglect and trauma still affecting Indigenous peoples and tribes to this day, it can be hard to imagine that one statement delivered at select events or printed in a few publications can be of any help at all. However, while a land acknowledgement is only a first step in supporting Indigenous populations, its presence helps spread awareness on the history of tribes in an area, as well as their current lives there. Mary Lyons of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, a tribe in Minnesota, says, “When we talk about land, land is part of who we are. It’s a mixture of our blood, our past, our current, and our future. We carry our ancestors in us, and they’re around us. As you all do.”

If writing and implementing a land acknowledgement is a fairly simple task compared to putting funds and other resources into projects led by Indigenous communities, then why hasn’t Lakeside yet started to use one at official events? Many efforts have been made, but despite the simplicity of the goal, it’s become an ever-increasingly complicated task to get one implemented.

As many know, Indigenous peoples have had an unjust and complex history in this country, state, and city. The Treaty of Point Elliott of 1855 exchanged 54,000 acres of land (including Seattle, Renton, Tukwila, Bellevue, Mercer Island, and much of King County) to the federal government in exchange for the hunting and fishing rights of the tribes, as well as reservations. A decade later, U. S. government officials started petitioning against granting the full rights of the treaty for the Duwamish tribe, so a reservation never came to fruition. The Duwamish tribe, Chinook nation, Snohomish Tribe, Kikiallus Nation, and many others within Washington still have yet to be federally recognized. A land acknowledgment could bring attention to the issues that Indigenous tribes have been petitioning and protesting against for decades.

Land acknowledgments are not a new conversation at Lakeside. 

The Indigenous Student Alliance (ISA) has collaborated with many different groups of students to bring the proposal to Lakeside administration. In 2021, Student Government, ISA (then-NASA, led by Aidan L. ’22 and Justin S. ’22), and a U. S. History class led by former history teacher Damaris Altomerianos presented a nine-page proposal for a spoken and written land acknowledgement, hiring of Native faculty and staff, more Native speakers, and a reevaluation of connections with Native communities through GSL. They included specific people and organizations to contact with their needs in a full appendix and testimonies from students who had experienced this lack in representation. However, when brought to Lakeside administrators, the initial proposal was unceremoniously rejected. This, paired with the fact that many of the students and faculty involved with the project were leaving, brought the land acknowledgment effort to a standstill.

Last year, I led a club called Do It for the Duwamish, which focused on depolluting the Duwamish River. The river has great significance to the Duwamish people and affects many communities of color, so the club became involved in the push for a land acknowledgement at Lakeside. Teaming up with Student Government and the ISA, we became part of a group called the Land Acknowledgement Committee (LAC). We started work on smaller projects, such as getting land acknowledgements implemented in smaller events such as assemblies and publications such as Numidian, Tatler, and school communications. (Numidian and Imago have begun including land acknowledgements in their publications!) While working on these with the ISA, I had the opportunity to read and learn more about the proposal written by Aidan L. ’22 and Justin S. ’22, sparking discussions about why the proposal had been turned down.