Montana is the traditional homeland and common hunting grounds of several tribes, including the Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Chippewa Cree, Crow, Gros Ventre, Kootenai, Little Shell, Northern Cheyenne, Pend d’Oreille, Plains Cree, Salish, Sioux, Hidatasa, Mandan, and Arikara. Today this land is home to twelve sovereign tribes with over 67,000 enrolled members.
When MNA hosts large, ticketed events, we have made a commitment to partner with a Native led and serving organization to take our acknowledgement into action. Past partners have included Western Native Voice, Helena Indian Alliance, All Nations Health Center, and Chief Dull Knife College. In most cases this partnership includes a donation in the amount an MNA Member ticket registration, sharing a Call to Action or message written by the partner, and an invitation to provide a welcome at the event. We also sometimes invite audience members to make additional donations to the organization throughout the event. This is always dependent on the partner and their needs and wishes.
We are still learning in this practice and expect it to evolve. At this year’s MNA Annual Conference, our land acknowledgment partner is Four Points Press. Please see a message below from Luella Brien of Four Points Press:
Four Points Media welcomes you to Billings and to Crow Country.
Four Points Media welcomes you to Crow Country. This place now known as Billings, located on the banks of the Elk River, has always been a gathering place, as it was once one of our most fertile hunting grounds.
As we convene from across the state for the annual Montana Nonprofit Association conference we must acknowledge that traditionally Montana was home to many tribes, including the Blackfeet, Crow, Cheyenne, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, Salish, Kootenai, Pend d’Oreille, Chippewa, Cree, and Sisseton, Wahpeton and Yankton Sioux. Your communities have all been home to one or more of those tribes.
This state’s bountiful wild game, traditional food and medicinal plants provided everything our people needed, much like how Montana’s nonprofits now provide for the people of this state.
As we spend this time together, let us remember to support each other’s missions, care for each other’s struggles, and celebrate each other’s victories.
Four Points Media is the home to Four Points Press, a digital news outlet that covers the Crow Indian Reservation. Our mission is to train the Apsaalooke people to tell their own stories, to give us our voices back.
I challenge each and every nonprofit across Montana to hold space for your clients to tell their own stories. You will learn far more than you ever expected to learn.
Why do we do land acknowledgements?
The United States is Indigenous territory and has been stewarded by Indigenous people since time immemorial. This knowledge provides us with an opportunity, not only to recognize the painful history upon which the state of Montana exists, founded on state-sanctioned and state-funded genocide, which included warfare, displacement, and dispossession of ancestral lands, broken treaties, desecration of sacred sites, destruction of the environment through extractive industries, and near-genocide of buffalo, criminalization of religious and cultural practices, residential boarding schools, allotment, removal of children from families, but also the ongoing efforts to diminish tribal sovereignty, the violence directed at these communities through Murdered and Missing Indigenous women, and the disparate impacts of poverty, voting barriers, incarceration, and police killings on Indigenous people. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, which only emphasizes the need for change.
Moreover, this knowledge necessitates solidarity and collaboration led by Indigenous people, alongside Black, brown, and other people of color, and including others because true liberation will only come from confronting our history, understanding the divisions, celebrating our love, joy, laughter, and knowledge, and uniting against the oppression of this earth and all people.
Land acknowledgements cannot repair inequity or return stolen land. No one entity can fix these issues, it will take a community guided by duty, responsibility, reciprocity with care for each other and the land. Therefore, as an association, MNA strives to represent all our members, but our mission is to serve the entire nonprofit sector in Montana. We know we are stronger together, but to truly come together we must all commit to education, action, and change. We are slowly beginning this work, and humbly invite those of you ahead of us to help lead, and those of you just beginning to join alongside.
Thank you for joining us for this moment of reflection, and we welcome your suggestions for ways we can continue growing together.
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