From the first migration of humans out of Africa to the contemporary refugee crisis, our eighth through tenth grades studied the movements of people across the planet in their World Migrations class. A focus of the three-week course was the movement of Native American tribes. First students learned about the seasonal migrations of tribes for millennia. Then they learned about their forced migration to reservations and in flight from the Eugenics movement, which was promoted by academics and social workers in Vermont and sought to sterilize citizens deemed “undesireable” in the 1920s and ‘30s. Students learned about the land around them that was used and protected by Abenaki people for many generations.
Hannah Epstein of the Nature Conservancy teaching the students about local plants and animals.
As part of their coursework, students met with Don Stevens chief of the Nulhegan Abenaki, walked the lands of both school campuses guided on the La Platte Marsh by the Nature Conservancy staff, learned about local plants and animals, and created a large-scale group art piece inspired by the flora and fauna of the lands around the school. They wrote a Land Acknowledgment on behalf of the Lake Champlain Waldorf School, naming the Abenaki tribe as the original people of the land, and stating their collective intention to be good stewards of the land the school now uses.
The Land Acknowledgment was approved by the Lake Champlain Board of Trustees on January 23, 2020, and will now become part of the school’s culture and practice, spoken on special occasions as a reminder of the student and faculty’s obligations to the earth and the people who have tended it for generations.
Here is the statement the school adopted:
We gather as the Lake Champlain Waldorf School Community, two campuses and one school, to acknowledge that we are on the unceded land of the Abenaki people who have cared for it for generations and continue to do so. Their relationship to the land calls us to learn to be better caretakers of the land ourselves. We pay our respects to the elders past and present. We honor with gratitude this land and all it gives us.
Want to know more?
Click to see “This is how we learn”, a video highlight of the Land Acknowledgement Ceremony on our YouTube channel.
Shelburne News ran a story titled: “Land acknowledgment project honors Abenaki”. Click the picture above to view.