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2025 AEE Conference Land Acknowledgement

Pittsburgh—known as Diondega in Seneca—is located at the confluence of the Allegheny (best flowing river of the hills or beautiful stream) and Monongahela (Mënaonkihëla, the dirt caves off, or where one might fall in) rivers, forming the Ohio River (Ohi:yo’, Seneca for good or great river).

These are the traditional lands of the Seneca Nation (Onöndowa'ga:' great hill people) part of the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) which includes six Nations the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. In the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Lenape Peoples (Delaware) and Shawnee Peoples (šaawanwaki, warm weather people) migrated to this area to flee massacres by the English. 

Since time immemorial, these Nations have had a deep and enduring relationship with these lands and waterways and they persist, then, now and always. 

Colonization caused and continues to cause inexcusable harm and violence to humans, land and water for these Nations. 

In 1778, the Treaty of Fort Pitt marked the first peace treaty between the United States and a Native Nation. Though treaties are the "supreme law of the land," they have repeatedly been violated and ignored.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced displacement of Native Tribes from their ancestral homelands. From the 1870’s all the way into the 2000s Indigenous children were removed from their homes, lived at boarding and residential schools where they were separated from their community, their family, their culture and their language. These acts of ethnic cleansing continue to affect Indigenous families all across Turtle Island. 

In 1960, construction of the Kinzua Dam flooded nearly one-third of the Allegany Reservation—10,000 acres granted to the Seneca Nation under the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794), signed by President George Washington. This act displaced over 600 Seneca people and severed them from their ancestral homes. In April 2025, the Seneca Nation launched renewed efforts to reclaim the lands flooded by the dam and restore their legal title to the Red House Area, working toward justice and sovereignty.

“In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself, it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places” Robin Wall Kimmerer

This acknowledgement is not an endpoint—it is a beginning. It is a seed for sustained, responsible action that centers Indigenous sovereignty and well-being, with a commitment to justice for the next seven generations.

While we are together in Pittsburgh, the Fort Pitt Museum has an Exhibit called Homelands: Native Nations of Allegheny. It is open every day from 10 am to 5 pm and costs $10 for Adult Admission. For non-Indigenous Peoples to reconcile the past, we must understand the truth of what happened and continues to affect Indigenous Peoples, without truth there is no reconciliation. 

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