By: Collin King
Nothing lives long. Only the earth and mountains. -Cheyenne Chief White Antelope
In the United States, we live on colonized land, and we often lose touch with the tapestry of native lands that our neighborhoods, cities, and states sit on top of.
Beyond the indigenous words incorporated into our streets signs and counties, it can be difficult to answer the question: whose land was this?
In a DEI group I joined in Colorado, we were asked to challenge our own origin stories by introducing ourselves like this:
“Hi, my name is Collin, and I am from the land of the Caddo people, now known as North Louisiana.”
While this verbiage is too clunky for most settings, I found it to be a powerful exercise to consider the people, languages, and customs that stewarded the land of “my hometown” for thousands of years before its founding.
If you’d like to do the same over this National Native American Heritage month, I invite you to explore this database, where you can enter your own town or zip code and see its own native heritage:
For reference, here is a look at what we now call “Oregon”:
I would love to hear about the tribes that lived on lands that are significant to you. Please feel free to share (and see other’s responses) here:
