Land Acknowledgement

The DLF Forum and affiliated events will be meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s important to Team DLF to acknowledge our tourism and whose land we’re on wherever we gather.

Baltimore is the ancestral, unceded territory of the Susquehannock, Nentego (Nanticoke) and Piscataway Peoples, which is still home to many Native American people, including those who belong to the Lumbee, Piscataway, and Cherokee nations. We would like to offer our gratitude to the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who have cared for the lands we’re on.

As a team, we operate remotely year-round, which is also why we’d like to recognize the impact of the carbon footprint of technologies, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities.

We would also like to acknowledge the free people forcibly kidnapped from Africa who were enslaved on these lands. From the colony’s founding in 1634 until 1864, when the state of Maryland abolished slavery, enslaved Africans and African Americans were important in shaping the state’s history (1).

At CLIR, we are reflecting on what it means to make this acknowledgement and the type of action that must follow. In 2021, the DLF Forum and affiliated events were held online, so we made a donation to the Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia — where CLIR headquarters is located — in an effort to exemplify our commitment to beginning the process of interrogating and dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.

We continue the tradition of land reparations by making a $500 donation to the Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, Inc. Their mission is to be a coherent source of empowerment, preservation, and co-creation for indigenous communities of the Chesapeake region – while sharing their unique culture with the world. CLIR is happy to support this work.

(1) The Maryland State Archives (2007). A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland. Retrieved February 16, 2022, https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/intromsa/pdf/slavery_pamphlet.pdf.