Land Acknowledgement

Anti-War Committee Indigenous Land Acknowledgement

Read at our Free Palestine protest in front of Senator Klobuchar’s office on August 5, 2021

We want to take a moment at today’s protest to acknowledge that the Twin Cities was founded on land stolen from the Dakota. European Americans who came to colonize Minnesota used genocide, ethnic cleansing, violence, and lies to carve this state out of the land indigenous nations called home. 

It’s important as the anti-war movement to recognize that the U.S. was founded on settler-colonialism and slavery as we protest U.S. aid to Israel and Israeli apartheid. We cannot ethically denounce the daily theft of land from Palestinians without also denouncing the way the indigenous nations here were similarly pushed off their land using genocide and violence. We cannot ethically denounce Israeli apartheid without acknowledging the history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. It is critical that we push for an end to U.S. aid Israel and that we fight for racial justice and against white supremacy at home.

The Anti-War Committee has organized against the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq and against U.S. intervention in Colombia and Venezuela. The U.S. fought these conflicts for oil. We join with the Anishinaabe people against the building of Line 3 on their lands and pledge to fight against all pipelines.

We acknowledge the Dakota on whose ancestral homelands we gather, the treatment of Native peoples by the U.S. government, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their home here today. We commit to continue to fight for the liberation of our Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian siblings. We are all related.