Land, Water and Labor Acknowledgement

After much of the heavy lifting to get my modernized website up and running, I finally had some time to sit back and take a breath. I realized that I had land and labor acknowledgements on my LinkedIn profile as well as my personal and work email signatures set in my respective email account providers while I had none for my website.

So along with the typical copyright notice, I listed such an acknowledgement. Only, I went beyond what I typically hear these days. Alongside the land and labor acknowledgement, I also included a water acknowledgement. While I had developed the land and labor acknowledgement and included one sentence for the water, I expanded the water acknowledgement so that it could “stand” alongside its fellow acknowledgements.

The current version of my Land Acknowledgment on my website:

The land on which I live and work is the occupied and unceded territory of the Ohlone, Muwekma, Confederated Villages of Lisjan, who are seeking to rematriate the Huichin land on Turtle Island.

I chose to list the names of all indigenous peoples listed at the Native Land website. I chose to include the link to the rematriation website in the acknowledgement itself to publicize the efforts to reindigenize the land so that others could also contribute to such efforts. I chose to include the name that the indigenous tribes call this land — Huichin — to honor their language. Although the term Turtle Island is more Northeastern in origins, I referenced that term because it is more well known that Huichin and has been linked more often to the larger piece of land that the Huichin land sits upon.

In my email signatures and on LinkedIn, I collapse the land and water acknowledgements together so that it would only take that much more space:

Land Acknowledgement
The land on which I live and work is the occupied and unceded territory of the Ohlone, Muwekma, Confederated Villages of Lisjan, who are seeking to rematriate the Huichin land on Turtle Island. The Upper Mokelumne River watershed supplies water to this land.

For my website, though, I figured I had sufficient space to expand upon the water acknowledgement. So this is the current version of my Water Acknowledgement:

I acknowledge the water that sustains this land flows from the Upper Mokelumne River watershed, the ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Miwok and Washoe peoples. I recognize the diversion of this water from its natural course and the ongoing responsibility to protect the ecological integrity of the river system and support the Indigenous guardians of these headwaters.

For the Water Acknowledgement, I felt that it was important to use the names that the indigenous peoples used instead of the modern names for such waterways. Again, I use the original name of the waterway to acknowledge the original stewards who lived with the water cycles and not over them. Since I did not need to collapse the land and water acknowledgments together, I was able to link the Native Land site to the water acknowledgment to space out the external links by letting them “breathe.”

While in my email signatures and on LinkedIn, I cite a link to the Labor Acknowledgment, I figured I had sufficient space to expand on it on my website. So this is the current version of my Labor Acknowledgement:

I acknowledge the collective debt to Indigenous peoples, Asian and Latin American immigrants, and workers of African descent whose forced and exploited labor built this nation. I recognize the ongoing exploitation of incarcerated people and those denied the true value of their work. The theft of labor is the theft of generational progress.

The website linked in “generational progress” allows the visitor to find out more about this “collective debt” owed to those before us and what it cost us to build this nation, especially the mainland. The acknowledgement is far from complete, especially when I think of other U.S. territories and facts that have yet come to light.

In short, these acknowledgements are a work in progress. I am definitely open to suggestions, if you have any to offer. Thank you.