This is Native Land.
The Ohio State University is situated on the ancestral homelands of the Shawnee, Lenape, Miami, Wyandotte, Potawatomi, Peoria, Ojibwe, Seneca, and Cherokee peoples. We acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from this territory, and we honor and respect the 45 Indigenous Nations that continue to connect with this land today, and more broadly the native peoples of Abiayala—the American continent in its entirety.
Indigenous relationships to land are not merely historical or possible to abbreviate. We hope to expand settler recognition of Indigenous personhood by extending the voices of individual Natives who explore their connection to land and space through many mediums.
Installed along High Street and 10th Ave, Columbus, Ohio. 2020.
Artist’s statement:
Arvcúken ᏧᎸᏌᏓ ᏃᏈᏏ cvhocefkv tos. Mv nak-vhakv momet heleswv en hecatskes os. Heyv ekvnv este-cate os.
Space is made of shapes and layers. Cufe momet Yvhv-lanuce ehakes. Shapes connect to other shapes, layers dance with other layers. Cufe and Yvhv-lanuce hide in the patterns of space. Existence becomes interpretive, elusive.
This is Native land. The ancestral history and knowledge of the Indigenous people forced away from their connection to this land are obscured by colonial narratives and control of space. The Ohio State University sits on land taken from the Shawnee, Lenape, Miami, Wyandotte, Potawatomi, Peoria, Ojibwe, Seneca, and Cherokee peoples –- all removed from Ohio by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The tribes named in this mural are those originally referenced in the 2019 OSU Multicultural Center Land Acknowledgement (updated in 2020 by Melissa Beard-Jacob). Many of the tribes listed above had already been displaced from original homelands and pushed further west into Ohio by white settlers.
Heleswv vhayis.
What is elusive hides behind what can never be ignored again. This is a demand.
This is Native Land.
2020
Arvcúken Noquisi, 19, Mvskoke Creek & Cherokee
The two below videos are of our Epistemic Justice workshop facilitated by the Pachaysana Institute and their approach to the land acknowledgement.
To view a map supplied by Native-land.ca of some of these ancestral tribal territories, click here.