Inner Solutions Counseling Center (ISCC) provides services in what is now called Wilmington, North Carolina, which is located on the traditional and ancestral territory of the Waccamaw, Catawba, and Cape Fear People, among others whose names we may not know. For thousands of years, this land served as a site of community and exchange between Indigenous peoples, until settler-colonists seized it from them. Legacies of violence, oppression, dehumanization, dispossession, and settlement have intersected here, erasing names, traditions, cultures, languages, and ways of knowing. As mental health providers dedicated to our community, ISCC is committed to acknowledging and trying to better understand the full history of the place where we work, serve, and learn.

Additionally, the larger region seized, occupied, and now known as North Carolina is the present-day home of the Coharie, Lumbee, Haliwa-Saponi, Waccamaw Siouan, and Sappony Tribes, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, the Meherrin Indian Nation, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

We honor and respect the elders and members of the diverse Indigenous traditions connected to this territory we now occupy. As a community of clinicians, authors, and artists, we are personally and organizationally committed to honoring their legacies.

We offer our gratitude to Ecotone (UNCW), Symphony D. Oxendine, AP of educational leadership at UNC Wilmington’s College of Education, for her land acknowledgment for the University of North Carolina Wilmington; to the UNC Chapel Hill American Indian Center for information on Indigenous peoples in this region; and to the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture for its resources on land acknowledgment.

If you wish to consider the land where you, visit Native Land Digital: native-land.ca. For more on the practice and process of land acknowledgment, visit the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture at usdac.us. Full credit for these statements is given to https://ecotonemagazine.org/uncategorized/land-acknowledgment/