YOU’RE ON INDIGENOUS LAND.
The offices of American Blues Theater are located in Chicago, the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations. City of Chicago was founded by the son of an enslaved African woman who was regarded as the first non-Indigenous settler. His name was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable.
Many other nations including the Myaamia, Wea, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Thakiwaki, Meskwaki, Kiikaapoi, and Mascouten peoples also call this region home. This land has long been a center for Indigenous people to gather, trade, and maintain kinship ties.
Today, Chicago is home to one of the largest urban American Indian communities in the United States, and the country’s oldest urban-based Native membership community center, the American Indian Center Chicago (AIC).
American Blues Theater makes this acknowledgment as part of our commitment to dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
To learn more about land acknowledgements visit nativegov.org.
To learn more about & engage with the American Indian Center Chicago, visit aicchicago.org.
To learn more about the map, visit https://native-land.ca/
DIGITAL LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We gather today, in an effort to create art, in a new digital format, using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many Indigenous communities. This technology, which has now become central to our daily lives, leaves a significant footprint and contributes to changing climates that disproportionately affect Indigenous people. As we make sure of this digital format, it is imperative that we recognize the Indigenous Land, regardless of our geographical location. It is land once occupied and inhabited by hundreds of Native Tribes. Indigenous people’s homes were unceded by European settlers. The genocide and forced removal of Indigenous people from these lands is a history that must be acknowledged, and the current struggles of Indigenous people must be brought to the forefront, so that their plight is never forgotten.
This digital land acknowledgment is inspired by the work of producer & artist Adrianne Wong. Learn more here.