Indigenous Peoples’ Day in Great Barrington

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

With gratitude and humility, Back to Heart Center acknowledges that we are working, learning, speaking, and gathering on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people, who are the indigenous peoples of this land. In spite of the tremendous hardship of being forced from their homeland, today their community thrives in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. We pay honor and respect to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community’s ancestors past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable community for all.

To learn more about the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, please visit https://www.mohican.com/

We acknowledge too that, not only the Mohicans of our region, but the many Indigenous nations, from the territory we now call "southern New England," still survive and still exercise sovereignty. We acknowledge, in particular, these contemporary Indigenous nations: the Agawam to the East; the Nipmuc to the East; the Wampanoag and Narragansett to the Southeast; the Pequot  and Schaghticoke to the South; and the Abenaki to the North, among many others.  Recognizing that the entirety of the North American continent constitutes territory considered to be original Indigenous homelands, we respect the sovereignty of these and hundreds of other Native American Indigenous nations that survive today and we pledge to support the rights of these nations and the interests of Indigenous peoples.