Today we gather on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Hinono’eino (Arapaho), Tsétsėhéstȧhese (Cheyenne), and Núuchiu (Ute) peoples, among nearly fifty other Indigenous Nations historically connected to this region now called Colorado. Indigenous communities gathered here for millennia, engaging in life-building, community, trade, ceremony, and care for the land long before colonial borders or settlements existed.
Before the settler name Colorado, these lands and waters were known and cared for by Indigenous peoples in intimate relationships with the diverse local ecosystems. For example, the South Platte River, an essential lifeway and gathering place, has long been known in the Arapaho language as Niinéniiniicíihéhe (NEE-neh-nee-nee-CHEE-heh-heh), translating to “The Tallow River.” For the Arapahoe, tallow signified good food and good times – an expression of abundance, joy, and care. The Huerfano River, a sacred waterway for the Apache, is called Shii Koeii (shee-koh-EEE) or the people’s water, representing water as a shared and collective responsibility rather than something to be owned or controlled.
The Indigenous peoples of this land have long held, and continue to hold, deep relationships with the Divine. For the Ute, there is no migration story for this land. Their teachings hold that they were placed here by Sinawav, the Creator, and that their presence is inseparable from these mountains, rivers, valleys, and plains. This understanding affirms a sacred truth: the land is not merely inhabited, but lived with, prayed with, and cared for across generations, and sacred reciprocity between people, place, and Creator endures.
Indigenous peoples understand the land as alive and interdependent rather than as property. They care for it through intentional stewardship practices such as seasonal migration to allow regeneration, burning and tending of grasslands to support biodiversity, careful harvesting of plants and seeds, and deep knowledge systems rooted in reciprocal relationships with all beings. These knowledge systems were grounded in spiritual cosmologies that understand the land, waters, plants, animals, and ancestors as interconnected.
We acknowledge that Indigenous peoples were forcibly displaced from the lands they have always known as home through genocidal violence, broken treaties, and forced removal. This history includes events such as the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, when United States soldiers murdered 230 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people – most of them women, children, and elders – as well as the successive removals that drove many Indigenous people out of what is now called Colorado.
Yet Indigenous presence did not end with colonization. Today, the Northern Arapaho Tribe, Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Southern Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe –as well as other vibrant Indigenous communities from across Turtle Island– continue to live, sustain culture, and assert rights and sovereignty within and beyond this region.
We offer this acknowledgment not as a conclusion, but as a grounding.
May this moment call us into greater accountability to the land we live on, the native plants and animals who live here alongside us, and the people whose care has made life here possible. May we commit to practices of reciprocity, repair, and solidarity: learning from and listening to Indigenous leadership, supporting Indigenous sovereignty, and tending the land with humility and care. Like the sukkah, may we learn to make a home without making a claim; to receive the gifts of this land with gratitude, and to tend, protect, and nourish the soil that sustains us.