I like this site--curious to know others' thoughts. I think it can be useful in rethinking the standard land acknowledgment patterning because . . . + https://usfs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=fe311f69cb1d43558227d73bc34f3a32

instead of encapsulating thousands of years of movement, it shows (for some land) what nations the US took the land from and, if you follow the links, using what method (treaty/possession).

There's "no information" for many places, which obviously doesn't mean the USFS doesn't *know.* But in places that do have info, you can see what nations the US government took the land from, which REALLY seems most useful to me in thinking about land acknowledgments.

Two sides of the Columbia river: Portland was built on land ceded in (you probably know this if you know me at all LOL) the treaty with the Kalapuyas & other tribes in 1855;

SW Washington is tribal territory (incl Cowlitz, my tribe of enrollment) that was just taken by the Interior Sec. Re: Cowlitz land--the tribe had previously refused to sign a treaty with bad terms. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/108th-congress/house-report/368/1#:~:text=On%20March%2023%2C%201973%2C%20the,lands%20as%20delineated%20in%201855

Curiously, part of Portland along the river seems to still be Chinook territory! (If you see this & know something about this & wouldn't mind telling me more, I'd love it)

Anyway...extremely incomplete for those looking to find out, definitively, whose land they're on, but any tool will be. Looking at this, though, I think about the purpose of land acknowledgments:

I think their purpose is generally said to be to name & recognize the original stewards of the land, but something that is often lost is how the land was taken: by specific treaties the US government hasn't honored in specific ways; or without any agreement at all.

Acknowledging THAT is important, and it's not something left in the past--settlers are living on land their government took for them.

(BTW, when we talk about land back, we're talking about nations and their territory, not sending individual settlers away, but it's interesting to me that settlers identify so strongly as being the state itself and not just citizens of it!)

That's all for now. BTW, not a subtweet! Not a judgment passed on anyone's land acknowledgment. I shared the USFS link with someone and remembered I wanted to share it here after doing a talk about this stuff last week (or whenever it was).

(Also I used to work for USDA in tribal relations!)

OK I said I was done but one more thing: it *is* important to know about the movement history of a place and not just the "cession," especially because the US government didn't understand tribal nations that didn't look like the nations they expected--

this is true in the Portland area and is reflected in the US government documents and the ways tribes are named and grouped (and if you've ever struggled to do a land acknowledgment in Portland or Seattle & have limited knowledge you should read SHADOW TRIBE and NATIVE SEATTLE)

so, I really do NOT mean to say the only tribes to acknowledge are the ones who show up in US documents; I DO mean to say that acknowledging a former presence is not as useful without acknowledging how the land became the US.