Colorado land acknowledgement 

The Boulder Valley was first the home of Native Americans, primarily the Southern Arapaho tribe. Utes, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Sioux were occasional visitors to the area. We do not have permission to be here. There are no words sufficient enough to capture the legacy and continuation of violence, displacement and genocide that position us to be gathering here in “community” and “safety”. We are here to humble ourselves, to respect this land and to regard this land as sacred.

Gold seekers established the first non-native settlement in Boulder County in 1858. There were 4,044 lots laid out at a purchase price of $1,000 each (5000 square feet for $1). It developed as a supply base for miners going into the mountains in search of gold and silver. The mountains began to be dynamited and torn apart.

In 1864, Cheyenne and Arapaho became victims of the Sand Creek massacre, an attack by the Colorado militia. A rancher had brought troops to attack a group of 15 Arapaho warriors who had asked for reward from bringing his mules back to him. The warriors acted in self-defense, and sent the troops running. Word got back to Colonel John Chivington, who “ordered troops to find and ‘chastise’ the ‘Indians’. Soldiers burned villages and sought out to kill Indians, the violence escalating until November 1864, when the Sand Creek massacre happened.

This led to further decades of violence between settlers and Native people. The US recruited Indian warriors from tribes that were enemies with the Arapaho–Cheyenne–Lakota–Dakota alliance to act as scouts, including from the Crow, Arikara, and Shoshone. Unlike previous conflicts involving the Lakota–Dakota–Cheyenne–Arapaho alliance and the United States the Great Sioux War ended in a victory for the United States. The bison herds which were the center of life for Native people were considerably smaller due to government supported whole-scale slaughter. Decreased resources and starvation was the major reason for the surrendering of individual native bands and the end of the Great Sioux War.

[Invite everyone to take a deep breath together]
1859-1919, 175 lynchings. Only five recorded lynchings are explicitly tied to race, but likely many more took place. One in particular – lynching of a sixteen-year-old African American, Preston Porter, Jr. In 1900, Porter was burned at the stake in front of a cheering mob of almost 300 people in Limon. Other victims of lynching included Catholics (namely Irish and Italians), Native Americans, and Chinese residents.

[Invite everyone to take a deep breath together]
In 1922, more than 200 hooded and robed members of the Ku Klux Klan slowly drove down Pearl Street in 63 automobiles. In 1924, the Klan burned a 53-foot cross on Flagstaff Mountain. The Klan’s original focus was white supremacy, and in the 1920s, they turned their opposition to Catholics and Jews. Boulder’s Catholic church members found burning crosses on their front lawns.

[Invite everyone to take a deep breath together]
Which brings us to the present day, when on March 1 in 2019 there was an incident in which multiple gun-wielding cops hassled Zayd Atkinson, an African-American student of Naropa university, who was picking up trash on his own property.

[Invite everyone to take a deep breath together]
We also honor the many movement ancestors of this land, those known and unknown, who have stood up for justice, for freedom, and spoken truth at great risk, throughout history. We know we stand on their shoulders, and honor their many contributions to the possibility of a thriving world.

[First paragraph is adapted from Perri DiJardin of Pearlstone Retreat Center. The rest was compiled by Morgan Curtis – one of the DNA team members of the Yet-to-be-named-network. Please feel free to add historical details related to patriarchy and speciesism to this list]