Land and History Acknowledgement
Many PW and church meetings now begin with a land acknowledgement—a recognition that the event is taking place on land European colonizers stole from Native Americans. In her work as Presbyterian Women’s 2021–2024 Churchwide Vice-Moderator, Kathleen Keefer has heard and offered a number of land acknowledgements. In the March/April 2023 issue of Horizons, she wrote about how her acknowledgements have changed, and will continue to change as she learns. She begins meetings with an acknowledgement that Indigenous people cared for and were cared for by all of the land we now call the United States, and the ways that European colonialism and white supremacy have sought to harm, rob, disenfranchise or kill Indigenous people, people of color and many other groups who fall outside white patriarchy.