RP@P Land Acknowledgement

This Land: Lenapehoking

We at Restorative Practices @ Penn acknowledge that we live and work on Indigenous land, known to the original Indigenous people as “Lenapehoking.”[1] Lenapehoking is the homeland of the Lenape or Delaware people, encompassing parts of present day Western Connecticut, Eastern Pennsylvania, the Hudson River Valley, New Jersey, and Delaware, with Manhattan at its center.[2] For at least 10,000 years, Indigenous people have lived on, cared for, and cultivated these lands, which still bear many Lenape names including: Passyunk (from Packsegonk, meaning “in the valley”); Wissahickon (from Wisameckhan, meaning “catfish stream”); Kingsessing (from Chingsessing, meaning “place of the meadow”); and Manayunk (meaning “place where we go to drink,” the original name for the Schuylkill River), among many others.[3]

The University of Pennsylvania in Lenapehoking

Philadelphia, including the land on which the University of Pennsylvania stands, was once the lands of the Lenape People, and were taken either through treaty, purchase, and trickery over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Native Peoples across the continent have experienced similar dispossessions and displacements. After generations of displacement, Lenape tribal nations include: the Delaware Tribe and Delaware Nation (in present-day Oklahoma); the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, Ramapough Lenape, and Powhatan Renape (in present-day New Jersey); the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans (in present-day Wisconsin); and the Munsee Delaware (in present-day Ontario, Canada). Here at Penn, there is a vibrant community of Indigenous students represented by Natives at Penn, and a small but critical presence of Indigenous Peoples on our staff and faculty.

Our Responsibilities to be in Right Relationships

Take a moment to consider your relationship to this land. Are you native to this place? Are you descended from early colonists? Enslaved African people? Later immigrants? Are you an immigrant yourself? Whatever your origins, we all live in a settler colonial state that dispossessed Indigenous people of their lands. Each of us, in our own ways, reaps the consequences of that dispossession. Let us call to mind the Indigenous histories of this place and think about what it means to live restoratively in this context. What actions might each of us take as individuals, and as members of this institution, to be in right relationship with Indigenous peoples, and to recognize Indigenous sovereignties?[4]

Restorative Justice and Indigenous Peoples

Recognizing that a land acknowledgement without action is an empty, performative gesture, we at Restorative Practices @ Penn are committed to surface the origins of interpersonal, social, global, and structural harms and the needs that arise from them. We feel a responsibility to address the first harm of the dispossession of the land we stand on through raising awareness of, and applying, restorative justice practices. For example, we utilize Circle as an approach to facilitating reconciliation within an anti-oppression framework. We are inspired by Indigenous models of relationality, reciprocity, and mutual obligation and seek to apply these in practices of restorative justice.