Urban Pastorals
Facilitating conversations among Somerville-area communities and individuals by building awareness of our shared environments
We acknowledge
Somerville is located on land that is sacred to the Naumkeag, Pawtucket, and Massachusett nations.
From the tribal website of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag:
“The Massachusett tribe are the descendants of the original people that the English Invaders first encountered in what is now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We against all odds have survived as the descendants of the first people of Massachusetts. We continue to survive as Massachusett people because we have retained the oral tradition of storytelling just as our ancestors did. This tradition passes on the Massachusett view of how our world works, our relationship with all of nature and why things are the way they are. There are ways of perceiving and doing things in our community that trace back thousands of years. There are medicine ways thousands of years old that we still practice today. We honor our ancestors for keeping the traditions they were able to keep, for their foresight, for the gifts they left to us and for their continued guidance.”
Locate your historical and present-day relationship to Indigenous stewardship of the lands you occupy by visiting Native Land Digital.
We acknowledge that our current climate emergency cannot be addressed without simultaneously addressing the racial, gender, and economic oppressions that have enabled an ever-expanding extractive capitalism, environmental degradation of Indigenous lands and vulnerable communities, and health disparities in gateway and environmental justice communities, where fossil fuel infrastructure has been historically located.