Land Acknowledgments

My husband and I own a home that stands on sacred and stolen land, land once home to indigenous wildlife and to indigenous peoples. The deer and coyotes we sometimes see in our neighborhood are descended from creatures who roamed here freely before the developers descended. 

On our street, October 2020

I have not yet been able to determine exactly which First Peoples lived on the land where my home sits, but the Atfilati band of the Kalapuya (Tualatins) seasonally migrated to a nearby area to fish, hunt, and forage, and the Clowella Chinooks also made their home near mine. The Portland Metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Tumwater, and Watlala Bands of Chinook, the Tualatin Kalapuya, the Molalla, and other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. 

Beginning with the first "settlers" in our area, the Native peoples here were nearly wiped out by disease. Territorial and, after 1859, federal policies such as boarding schools were designed to eliminate or assimilate them. In 1954, the Western Oregon Termination Act ended federal recognition of these tribes. For the next three decades, the tribes were "a landless people in their own land."  In 1983 their federal status was finally restored, and five years later they regained part of their original reservation with the signing of the Grande Ronde Reservation Act. You can learn more about the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde here.

"Promised Land" is an award-winning social justice documentary that follows two Pacific Northwest tribes, the Chinook and the Duwamish, as they fight for long denied treaty rights. You can watch the trailer here and learn more about the Chinook Nation here.  

Nowadays, many institutions begin their meetings and public events with a land acknowledgment. And it is more than fitting that they do so. We cannot begin to repair relationships and right wrongs until we can admit the injury that has been done and the harm that has followed from it, generation upon generation. So I, too, must acknowledge that I live on land that belonged to Original Peoples and was taken from them, and that I owe a debt because of that. 

But it's not a complete acknowledgment to name only the peoples from whom the land was taken. To be fully honest, I must also name the people from whom the land was kept. It starts with the founding of Oregon as a White utopia. Oregon passed its first Black exclusionary law in 1844, when this was still a territory. Although it banned slaves, the law prohibited Blacks already here from living in the territory longer than three years. In 1849, another exclusionary law prohibited Blacks not already in the territory from entering or residing here. And when Oregon became the 33rd state in 1859, voters rejected a proposal to legalize slavery but approved an exclusionary clause that was incorporated into the Bill of Rights, prohibiting Blacks from being in the state, from owning property, or from signing contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusionary clause in its constitution.  

Although the laws were rarely enforced, they did accomplish the goal of establishing and maintaining Oregon as a majority White state. Portland is still the Whitest major city in the United States. Our racism is systemic, institutional, and deeply entrenched. Although the exclusionary clause became unenforceable under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it was not repealed by voters until 1926. The last racist language remained in our state constitution until 2002. 

For much of its history, Portland's real estate industry helped to restrict where Blacks could rent or buy homes, and the City of Portland did nothing to prevent it. In 1919 the Portland Realty Board adopted a rule making it unethical for an agent "to sell property to either Negro or Chinese people in a White neighborhood." This language was not removed from the Code of Ethics until 1956, the year my home was built. 

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Authority engaged in purposeful discrimination against communities of color in issuing FHA-guaranteed housing loans. As scholar Richard Rothstein explains in The Color of Law, the FHA made its greatest impact on segregation not in the way it handled individual loan applications, "but in its financing of entire subdivisions, in many cases entire suburbs, as racially exclusive white enclaves." Together with the exclusionary zoning, racially restrictive covenants, and redlining that prevented Blacks and others from living in certain areas, this systemic action contributed to the myth of de facto segregation that persists today. This myth would have us believe that racially segregated neigborhoods "just happen," when in fact they are the intended outcome of ongoing systems and structures.

My "so White" neighborhood is by design, not happenstance. So as I acknowledge and lament that I live on the unceded land of the Chinook and Kalapuya Peoples, I also acknowledge and lament that what is now deemed the real property I live on has been intentionally and systematically denied to Blacks and others for no purpose other than to sustain White supremacy. 

There is much to be done to address these wrongs. Land acknowledgments are worth little unless they are followed by action. But they are an essential first step: we cannot lament, repent, and repair unless we can first name the injustice and look at it honestly. That is an overdue task that we can take up today. And we must.

Love,

Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Grandma