We as a group acknowledge our privileges, identities, and positionalities in the context of this project, as non-indigenous, university-educated researchers at a Land Grant state university. We understand that by virtue of being students at the University of Vermont (UVM) we in some way benefit and succeed in our academic spheres on dispossessed Native (Abenaki) land, in an institution that was funded at the start with profits from seizing Native territory in the mid-1800s. 

 

We do not identify as indigenous nor have we experienced life as an indigenous person in North America. As a result, we cannot fully understand that experience. Among the six members of this group, we are all white, or white-identified. There is diversity in identities of gender and sexuality, however, we all still benefit from our own forms of privilege. 

 

We recognize that our individual privileged opportunities of relative comfort, access to resources, and ability to enjoy expansive landscapes are possible, in part, because of colonial dispossession, resource allocation, genocide, cultural suppression, and imposed systems of Western power onto Native communities throughout the history of the United States.