Final revision (Approved by Living Waters Lutheran Church Council May 9, 2024)

Living Waters Lutheran Church Land Acknowledgment

1808 Miller Road

Crystal Lake, IL 60014

McHenry County

USA

N 42° 11.443 W 088° 21.592

We acknowledge that Living Waters Lutheran Church is situated on the traditional land of the Illiniwek,* Kickapoo, Mascouten, Meskwaki (Fox), Sauk, Potawatomi, and tribes whose names have been lost as a result of genocide. They hunted, fished, gathered, and traded, stewarding the land in this region.

Living Waters resides on a parcel of the land between the Mississippi and Fox Rivers that the Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) ceded in the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis. They were forced to relocate and moved to land in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. In 1803, the Kaskaskia tribe signed a treaty giving up its land claims in Illinois in exchange for two small reservations on the Kaskaskia and Big Muddy Rivers. In 1832, two years after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced any remaining Native Americans off land east of the Mississippi, the Kaskaskia merged with the Peoria tribe and moved to a reservation in Kansas.

As of the 2000 census, more than 700 Sac and Fox tribal members lived on the Sac and Fox/Meskwaki Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land in Iowa, about 200 on the Sac and Fox Reservation located in Nebraska and Kansas, and more than 7,000 in the Sac and Fox Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Area, which is governed by the Sac and Fox Nation. The descendants of the Kaskaskia are enrolled in the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.

We acknowledge that we are on land that was taken from its original stewards. We affirm that while we cannot change history, we can work for justice, and that justice begins with recognition and acknowledgment.

*The Illiniwek Confederation includes the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Peoria, and Tamaroa tribes.