UMISC Land Acknowledgement

It is a challenge to write a land acknowledgement for an online conference that is at once everywhere and no where precisely. However, our content and audience is very much focused on the Upper Midwestern U.S. and Canada. These lands were once home to a wide variety of indigenous peoples who were forced from their lands through colonization. We encourage UMISC attendees to visit the Native Lands online map tool to begin learning about the indigenous peoples who once lived in their places of work.

Indigenous peoples of the Upper Midwest harvest ancestral foods, such as Manoomin (wild rice).

The administrative work of UMISC 2020 was largely conducted in the Fox River Valley region of Illinois, about 40 miles west of Chicago. This area was home to Potawatomi people. Bands of Potawatomi still live, manage lands, and address invasive species challenges in various locations in the Upper Midwest and the Great Plains.