Moving toward Good Relations with Waters & Lands
As we embark on the journeys within & beyond the Cultural Equity Learning Community, we invite you to reflect with us on this beginning point: this historical moment, and the landwaters we are working to steward better.
Arts Connect International organizes from the lands and waterways of the Massachusett people who have called this place from the headwaters of the Quinobequin to the mouth of the Narragansett bay home since time immemorial. While our organization is situated here, our team also lives, creates, organizes, and has deep roots in Kumeyaay, Kizh, Gabrielino, Tongva, Narragansett, Lenape, Catawba, Sugeree, Wampanoag, and Pokanoket landwaters. Most of us speak to you from Turtle Island, a name that many Indigenous peoples across the North call this continent, and all of us speak to you from Abya Yala, the northern and southern continent considered as one.
We want to recognize that our program is shared digitally via the internet. To quote the digital land acknowledgement of artist Adrienne Wong, “Let's take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technology, structures, and ways of thinking we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet, not available in many Indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art we make, leave significant carbon footprints, contributing to changing climates that disproportionately affect Indigenous people worldwide.”
[We] invite you to join us in acknowledging all this, as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization, and [co-conspiratorship].”
We acknowledge these landwaters we inhabit and the Indigenous communities who have been here for millenia, as well as the stolen Black labor that cultivated these landwaters and built much of the world in which we live today. By naming the overlapping histories of colonization, imperialism, slavery, and cultural supremacy that have marked the past 500 years and shaped our modern society, we center our commitment to interrogate our relationship with the colonial project and to the reparations necessary to manifest liberated futures.
We also acknowledge the landwaters we inhabit because they are living beings with agency, knowledge, memory, and freedom. We are ever-forming deep relations to these beings, based in respect, gratitude, and care. We want to celebrate these landwaters, honoring them as our homes, and also address the points in which they are hurting, so that we may better tend to them and work toward collective liberation not only for humans, but for all Life.
We acknowledge these landwaters because we recognize our responsibility as cultural agents to shape a culture rooted in justice, equity, and collective liberation. By engaging in deep introspection and interrogation of our culture, we hope to dismantle oppressive structures, transform systems for collective good, and build anew.
In this moment, we want to express both our individual and collective commitments to intentional and holistic action beyond acknowledgement, embodied in this program and beyond:
We affirm our commitment to the collective liberation of the communities that we carry with us.
We commit to centering Black and Indigenous voices throughout the Cultural Equity Learning Community and the wider work of Arts Connect International.
We commit to supporting decolonization and liberation worldwide, while amplifying calls for reparations.
We commit to sharing a co-creative, iterative, growing archive of Black and Indigenous artists to follow, hire, and pay reparations.
We acknowledge that this statement will evolve as we continue to learn and grow.