Miyaxwe (mee-yahh-weh, hello) — In the spirit of Rupert and Jeanette Costo’s founding relationship to our campus, we would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land, water and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all of their ancestors and descendants, past, present and future. Today this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands.

Here in the Department of Dance, we extend this to acknowledge the multiply fraught histories of this land. We recognize what was taken for this University to be built, including the enslaved labor and ongoing exploitations that have contributed significantly to the wealth in the U.S. that helped found the University of California, and the migrations and immigrant labor that have contributed significantly to this area. We register that members of our community have benefitted, and continue to benefit, from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1907. We also acknowledge the ancient relations of friendship, kinship and alliance between various local Native communities, and visitors to this region.

This acknowledgment is part of our Department’s commitments: to confront exclusions and attempted erasures of Indigenous, Black, and Brown peoples, and others; to accept/embrace/acknowledge peoples’ bodies in their wide range of capacities, abilities, forms, and qualities; to be radically inclusive of queer peoples and bodies in the world and in our field; to support peaceful human mobility across land and waters for all; to being good guests as we travel; to being in respectful relationship to the land wherever we are; and to building relationship with one another–including, for those of us who are not Native to these lands—becoming good allies, and accomplices. We continue to work creatively towards enacting practices and policies that register these histories and strengthen these layers of knowledge and ways of being.

–Achama (aw-chem-ahh, thank you)