Faculty Approve Land Acknowledgment
On January 28, 2022, the Collegial Assembly at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture endorsed use of an Indigenous land acknowledgment to recognize the history of the native peoples who originally inhabited the lands on which the school sits.
In consultation with the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, we offer the following as suggestions for land acknowledgment statements to be used before all public events within Tyler.
In tandem with offering this land acknowledgment, we consider the histories of exclusion and erasure that have affected the Lenape since European colonization, guided by the principles of equity and inclusion as identified in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture mission, vision and values statements.
We do not wish land acknowledgments to become performative, but are seeking to move the students, faculty, and staff of the Tyler community to remember and honor the original inhabitants of the land we occupy and the legacies of settler colonialism.
In doing so, we remind ourselves that it is our duty to be good stewards of the land that we occupy, on both the Main and Ambler campuses. We encourage the members of the Tyler community to support mindful engagement with the significance of land acknowledgment, perhaps by research into Lenape histories and culture and European colonialist histories in the region; by discussing these histories in and out of class; engaging in land stewardship; and participating in broader community actions in partnership with the Lenape and other Indigenous groups.
We ask any speaker, as they form the land acknowledgment they will say, to be mindful of three things: the Lenape see themselves as caretakers, not possessors, of the land; the Lenape are still present on their ancestral homelands; there are actions we can encourage to make this statement more meaningful.
