land & people acknowledgments

We, artists and art partners on projects produced or platformed by i•ma•gine e•volve, would like to acknowledge that we live and do our work on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, and shared waters of all tribes and bands named and unnamed including Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Suquamish, and Tulalip nations. 

We recognize additionally that this landscape named Washington has been shaped by Chinese, Japanese and Filipino laborers, who have built railroads and worked in mines, crop fields, logging camps and salmon canneries, and that African Americans have worked in shipyards and founded The Northwest Enterprise, a newspaper serving a key role in supporting Black communities in Seattle.  

We acknowledge that our collaborative projects span borders beyond our home in the Northwest, happening in Eastern and Global South unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), Cheyenne, Arapaho, Seminole, Yamayeka, and Taino peoples. 

We pay respects to the ancestors, to the elders, and to present rural and urban indigenous and native communities for holding the painful and complex histories of how we came to be together on these lands, while stewarding rights, access, and protections for present and future generations. 

When we acknowledge and make space for solidarity work, we understand that this means holding these complex and inescapably intertwined historical relationships with nuanced care for a future that attends to us all, and the environmental urgencies now upon us that seek to correct and transcend these colonial inheritances of oppression.

We invite you to research the ancestral histories and indigenous presence of the land you occupy here at Native Land Digital, a Canadian based + Indigenous lead and non-academic land survey that is actively and collaboratively researched and updated by community contributors. 

You can also contribute to a number of Land Back initiatives that support peoples unrecognized or unsupported by the US Federal Govt, or orgs that seek to aid displaced communities who identify as or live at the intersection of Black, brown, indigenous, and queer communities. These organisations named below are based in Seattle, Western Washington.

Image of a map of parts of the Americas - Northern, Caribbean, and top of South America with Indigenous land names

Learning Resource: https://native-land.ca