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What is an ancestral land statement? According to the National Museum of the American Indian, Land acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native nations and communities. Today, land acknowledgments are used by Native Peoples and non-Natives to recognize Indigenous Peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which we now live.

Example: “We gratefully acknowledge the Native Peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their home here today.”

—National Museum of American Indian Land Acknowledgment

How to organize your school to create an Ancestral Land Statement

Here are the five steps I used to create an Ancestral Land Statement for Durham Academy:

Make sure your school doesn’t already have an Ancestral Land Statement by asking a faculty member.

1. Create a student committee to draft a statement.

2. Find members of local tribes and ask for their review and input.

3. After drafting and editing multiple times, finalize the statement by showing it to your school’s board.

4. Make sure that your statement is well seen by putting it in places that people pass by or on the school’s website.

If you’d like to know what first nations lived where you live now, you can put in your city town or zip code at this site: https://land.codeforanchorage.org/. It is interesting to consider some renderings of what that alternative map of the US would look like. The map above is one example. https://native-land.ca/ Notice that the boundaries are flexible and merge, not the type of hard-edged legal ownership and boundaries we define our land by today. First Nations did not have the same idea of ownership and use we have today. They believed that land was sacred, did not belong to any person, and that we are all stewards for its care.