Shawnee Town 1929 Acknowledgment of the Land
Naming is an exercise in power. Who gets the right to name or be named?
Whose stories are honored in a name? Whose are erased?
Acknowledgment of traditional land is a public statement of the name of the traditional
Native inhabitants of a place. It honors their historic relationship with the land.
Laurier Students’ Public Interest Research Group, Ontario, Canada
www.lspirg.org/knowtheland
Our museum highlights history barely 100 years in the past, but our story stands on the foundation of a millennia of people who came and saw before us. Shawnee Town 1929 Museum respectfully acknowledges that we are built on the ancestral lands of indigenous American nations, including the Osage, the Kanza (or Kaw), and most recently, the former reservation lands of the Shawnee.
We occupy space that was forcibly ceded in a series of unjust treaties, leading to the decimation and removal of their communities from their rightful land. The Shawnee Nation migrated from their ancestral lands in modern-day Ohio and settled on their new treaty lands. They created the first permanent settlement that would become the modern-day city of Shawnee, Kansas. After the Shawnee were forcibly removed for the second time, traveling to new territory in Oklahoma, some members remained and their descendants continue their legacy of stewardship in our community today.
We commit to sharing the stories of the indigenous nations whose enduring ties to their ancestral lands remains embedded in their identities and traditions to this day. In addition, we recognize and support the sovereignty of the federally-recognized tribes of Kansas: the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.