A Land Acknowledgement for Earth Day Sunday
The church is not a building. But this church has a building. And this building is on this land. Here in Olympia, in Thurston County, in Washington state. And just as we belong to and are a part of this church, we belong to and are a part of this land.
This land is the traditional and current home of the Nisqually, Puyallup, Squaxin Island, and Chehalis people. The surrounding mountains, valleys, shorelines, and waterways are bursting with their living presence, past, present, and future. May we nurture our relationship with our Coast Salish neighbors and our shared responsibilities to this place—their homelands—where we mutually abide.
In the 1930’s, many parcels on this land bore racial restrictive covenants that say this land “shall never be rented, sold, or leased to any Negro, Mulatto, Indian, Chinaman, Japanese or any the so-called yellow races.”
In the 1940’s this land was a Japanese exclusion area. Japanese people who lived here were moved off of this land into an internment camp.
In the 1960s, this is the land where Billy Frank and others held protests to defend their civil rights and rights to fish in these waters.
This is the land where we and others have defended civil rights for our LGBTQ siblings.
Photo by author. Olympia Pride 2019
This is where we came with our youth with posters and chants to draw attention to our changing climate.
Our land is changing. We have breathed air thick with wildfire smoke. We have weathered too many floods, atmospheric rivers, heat waves. Here on the doorstep of this church, Barnett Moss lost his life during an unprecedented heat dome.
We are the people who can act together to insist to governments and corporations that we break our addiction to fossil fuels and our tolerance for destruction in the name of capitalism, and we prioritize protection of this place and its inhabitants.
We are the church. We belong to the land, our lives and wellbeing are interconnected with each other, and with the wellbeing of the land, and the plants and animals on it.
May we bring that sense of connection through space and time into our physical and virtual space today.