We open this space by honoring the practice and origins of land acknowledgment. This tradition exists because Native ancestors, relatives, and communities fought for their existence to be recognized—not as a gesture, but as a living truth.

Land acknowledgment is not a box to check or a formality to breeze through. It is a living ritual, a daily practice of remembrance and responsibility. It is an honoring of the deep relationship between land, people, memory, and future.

As a collective committed to care, justice, and reimagining liberatory futures, we recognize that we are gathering on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples—stewards of this land long before us, whose descendants are the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.

This land was not ceded willingly. It was taken through violence, broken treaties, forced assimilation, and unjust policies—like the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians and the California Fugitive Slave Act—which created systems of indentured servitude and dispossession that helped build this county and continue to shape the inequities we witness today.

Despite these harms, the original peoples of this land are still here—tending, creating, leading, and healing. We honor their continued presence and leadership, their ancestral knowledge, and their efforts to rematriate land, sustain cultural lifeways, and foster collective belonging.

We name our own positionality as a diverse, mixed-race collective—some of us carrying settler, colonizer, or visitor lineages, and others carrying lineages of survival, displacement, and resistance. We acknowledge that healing requires reckoning, and that we each hold a responsibility to learn, unlearn, and be in right relationship—with the land, with Indigenous peoples, with our ancestors, and with each other.

To practice land acknowledgment is to honor a story much larger than our own. It is to recognize that we are not neutral, that we are shaped by systems and histories—and that through presence, accountability, and collective care, we can participate in a different future.

We offer gratitude to the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples, and to the local organizations who continue to advocate for land, culture, and community, including:

• The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria

• Sonoma County Indian Health Project

• California Indian Museum

• Raizes Collective

• Alliance for Felix Cove

• Suscol Intertribal Council

We commit to honoring this land in action, in relationship, in how we gather, create, and build. May our work reflect our gratitude, our learning, and our responsibility.