LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

At Paper Plains Zine Fest, we are coming together in what is currently known as Lawrence, KS.

Present-day Lawrence occupies land from which its original stewards were forced to move. It is the traditional homelands of Kansa/Kaw Peoples, Shawnee Peoples, and Osage Peoples, from whom the federal government took the land in 1825.

Today as the ‘state of Kansas,’ this land is home to many First Nations People, including those recognized by the federal government — the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Sac and Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas and Nebraska and the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. As well, members of the Delaware, Quapaw, and Wyandot nations reside here. 

A land acknowledgment is the practice of recognizing the enduring presence, struggle, and resistance of those Native peoples who are the traditional guardians of the stolen land on which we gather.

We would also like to acknowledge our nation’s legacy of chattel slavery – the brutal enslavement of Black people, whose exploited labor created this nation’s wealth – and to emphasize that Black Lives Matter.

Through this practice, we recognize the historical reality that the United States is a genocidal settler-colonial state, built on imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.

With this acknowledgment, we assert our solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and raise awareness of marginalized histories that are often suppressed or forgotten, despite their centrality in shaping the American past, present, and future.