What is a Land Acknowledgment?

“Land Acknowledgements are a simple, powerful way to show respect to the original inhabitants of the land where you are currently standing, presenting, about to engage in an activity, etc. We believe that this is a meaningful step toward honoring the truth, making the invisible visible, and correcting the American stories that erase indigenous people’s tribal history and culture. Land Acknowledgements demonstrate a commitment to counter the Doctrine of Discovery and to undo the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism.” — Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness

Center for Trauma & Embodiment is officially located in Brookline, Massachusetts, though our many team members and facilitators live, work, and share this practice in many places around the world.

We would like to acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Pawtucket and Massachusett First Nations on which the Center for Trauma and Embodiment was founded. As a collective that aspires to be trauma-informed in everything that we do, we feel it is critical to recognize that erasing Native peoples by not acknowledging both their history and their living present is itself trauma.

The Center for Trauma and Embodiment seeks to align itself with the struggle against the systems of oppression that have dispossessed Indigenous people of their lands and denied their rights to self-determination — work that is essential to trauma stewardship across the world.