CCCESFC
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
California Community Colleges honors and acknowledges that our 116 campuses throughout the state of California are located in the unceded territories of the 109 federally recognized tribes and the dozens of tribes throughout the state who are seeking recognition. We are committed to supporting the ongoing relationships between these tribes, their ancestral territories and the resilience, strength and sovereignty that continues to be demonstrated by California’s first peoples. We affirm our intentions for ongoing relationships with American Indian Tribal Nations and communities whose ancestral lands we occupy and students we educate. A land acknowledgement is a critical step towards working with Native communities to secure meaningful partnership and inclusion in the stewardship and protection of their cultural resources and homelands. Our institutions were founded upon exclusions and erasures of Indigenous peoples. We honor and are grateful for the land we occupy and recognize the ongoing damage of settler colonialism.
We commit to pursuing continuous collaborations with the Tribal Nations of California. We strive to strengthen our awareness of historical and contemporary issues in California to reckon with our institutional legacy and its impact on the people, lands, waters of this place, which are, and always will be, inextricable.
-California Community College Chancellor's Office
For millennia, People of Color have paid tribute to their ancestors and the Divine with high regard and deep respect honoring the wisdom, guidance and appreciation given for their sacrifice(s) to bring peace, joy, goodness, love and prosperity upon the people and the earth that nurtures and gives life to them.
Labor, Land, and Life Acknowledgement
This land that we inhabit is physically situated in the original Ancestral homelands of California Native Nations. We pay respect to all California Tribal Nations – past, present, and future – and their continuing presence in the homeland and throughout their historic diaspora.
We pay homage to those who were stolen from Africa, placed in bondage, falsely named as chattel, and forced into labor, who were called “slaves,” but never submitted as such, who have always been fully human, with an unbroken connection to the Divine and to each other. We honor our African Ancestors for the still-unpaid labor which built what is now the Americas.
To both our California Native and African forebears, we commit to the continued struggle for liberation and reparations, for it is only through freedom and justice that we truly give honor.
AHO! ASHE!
