Should a land acknowledgement be part of our worship and other gatherings? We know that the land where each of us is joining in worship this morning was home to other people before us. We know, for example, that the plots of land where the Athens and Sheshequin church buildings are now, were home to indigenous communities before Europeans arrived. We’ve done a terrible job of remembering and telling that history. Even our historian Katie hard time finding a clear history of the people whose home this was before European disease and violence displaced them. We think they may be the Andaste, the Carantouan, the Susquehannock and the Haudenosaunee. The history we do find of the Valley often vilifies the peoples from whom we took the land. In fact, there is a historical marker near the Sheshequin church commemorating Sullivan’s march - a campaign of great violence and devastation to remove great the Haudenosaunee people from that land. Any land acknowledgement of the Athens and Sheshequin congregation to acknowledge, as the essay "Land Acknowledgments Meant to Honor Indigenous People Too Often Do The Opposite – Erasing American Indians and Sanitizing History instead" suggests “acknowledge the violent trauma of land being stolen from Indigenous people – the death, dispossession and displacement of countless individuals and much collective suffering.”
It’s common for people in Bradford County to talk of the native peoples as if they are a story from history. Yet we know that Indigenous people are part of the communities of the valley and the endless mountains, and still practice ceremony and pass on their tradition, but they don’t do so in a public way. What would it look like to create a land acknowledgement “carefully constructed in partnership with the dispossessed”?
On the land where the Cortland Church now stands, we can easily look on a map and see that this is part of the Haudenosaunee territory. The Confederacy has a present day governance and public presence reminding us that the Haudenosaunee are not a people of the past but of the present. The Haudenosaunee confederacy includes several nations, and the land of Cortland is specifically part of the homeland of the Onondaga nation who brought a land rights case against the state of NY in federal court in 2005 offering this statement:
“The Onondaga People wish to bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time. The Nation and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concepts of ownership, possession or legal rights. The people are one with the land, and consider themselves stewards of it. It is the duty of the Nation’s leaders to work for a healing of this land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations. The Onondaga Nation brings this action on behalf of its people in the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace, and respect among all who inhabit the area.”
Though the old cobblestone church is one of the oldest buildings still in existence in the county, this illustrates an erasure of that older history. A land acknowledgement given from this spot where I’m standing, would have to acknowledge that this spot is part of an active land rights case.
So today, we are not yet ready to put forward a sentence or even a paragraph of land acknowledgement. Today we acknowledge that each of us, right now, stands or sits on ambiguous territory, with a troubling history, and a complicated future. Today I invite us to rethink our responsibility to the land, our responsibility to one another, and to the indigenous communities and individuals who are our neighbors today. Today we acknowledge with humility all that we don’t know, and listen for the voices of those with more wisdom, voices we may not have heard, as we join with the Onondaga elders in hoping to “hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace, and respect among all who inhabit the area.”
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