 We acknowledge that the town of Arlington is located on the ancestral lands of the Massachusetts tribe, the tribe of indigenous peoples from whom the colony province and Commonwealth have taken their names. We pay our respect to the ancestral bloodline of the Massachusetts tribe and their descendants who still inhabit historic Massachusetts territories today. Land acknowledgement is not new. It's a traditional custom dating back centuries for many native communities and nations. For non indigenous communities, land acknowledgement is a powerful way of showing respect and honoring the indigenous peoples of the land on which we work and live. Acknowledgement is a simple way of resisting the erasure of indigenous histories and working towards honoring and inviting the truth. The land acknowledgement you just heard was authored by Faris Gray, Sagamore of the Massachusetts tribe. As such, it bears legitimacy and the support of the people it acknowledges. Land acknowledgements are particularly relevant to local governments whose jurisdiction is directly tied to local land boundaries. Adding this practice to our town government's various proceedings helps us celebrate and recognize the heritage of the people's indigenous to Massachusetts in Arlington. The purpose of this article is to ask town meeting to support the reading of land acknowledgements at the beginning of public meetings. It is an encouragement, not a mandate. Each body can and should decide when and how often to voice this acknowledgement, but we recommend that it be regular, not ad hoc. Thank you. I mean, I would love for for people to have a greater understanding of the indigenous population here. My ancestors went through and what we go through what our children have to go through here. Being indigenous and how we've been discriminated against how this trauma that that's been passed down through generations. I just don't think people have a good understanding of this. What I call a generational trauma that's passed down from the generations how would how assimilation has affected us. So I really wish we could have a greater understanding of the indigenous population that has been stripped of everything that they had stripped up their very being stripped of their connection to the earth. And what that means to us today. And a lot of people think we're just angry for something that happened so long ago that happened a long time ago why are you so angry because it continues to happen every single day it happens. We are still fighting for the earth, which is insane that we have to fight for the earth that people don't realize the importance of all the creatures. We are still fighting for our language to maintain our languages. We are still fighting to to maintain our spirituality that was been stripped from us. These things don't come easy. We are trying to decolonize ourselves, not because we hate our colonizers, because we want to remember who we were. The ancestral territories, the land and the water and everything that lives there are places where we have relationships and we believe that our lives depend upon those relationships and our spirituality is based upon those relationships as well. So while we don't own the land we are the caretakers of the land and we continue to be the caretakers of the land.