Starting with this week’s issue, The Mac Weekly is adding a land acknowledgment to our staff box. We owe a debt of gratitude to the past and present members of Proud Indigenous People for Education (PIPE), specifically Samantha Manz ’19 and Jennings Mergenthal ’21, as well as to their advisor, Professor Katrina Phillips, for their assistance in drafting the language below.

“This newspaper was written and produced on the homeland of Dakota people, who were forcibly exiled from the land they call Mni Sota Makoce by persistent and aggressive settler colonialism. Land acknowledgments can help us begin a process of reconciling how our modern existence is a result of the continual displacement of Indigenous peoples and nations. We make this acknowledgement to honor Dakota people, past, present, and future, as well as the land itself.”

Land acknowledgments call on us to stop and think about the history of the land on which we live. They ask us to consider what was done in many of our names in the past and what our continual displacement of Indigenous people means in the present and future.

We also hope that when people read the acknowledgment, they reflect on the remarkable activism of PIPE over the last several years.

Macalester has existed since 1874, and The Mac Weekly since 1914. That it has taken until now for our publication to add a land acknowledgment, and for land acknowledgments to become part of official campus programming more broadly, reflects the deep entrenchment of white supremacy here and across this country.

The Mac Weekly also recognizes that we as a newspaper and as a college have a responsibility to establish the inclusion of Indigenous people through action. This acknowledgment is a first step, but by no means the last.