Before we start this episode, we want to acknowledge something important.

This episode deals with a lot of questions about land ownership.

The day after this originally aired, we got a message from one of our listeners.

Hello, my name is Christina.

I'm listening in Oklahoma.

I'm getting in touch because as an Indigenous person and as a history teacher, I can get

a little frustrated when stories are told about settlers' communities in the United States

without an acknowledgment of whose land they reside on in Occupy.

So especially after the last couple of episodes, when I heard several people say things like,

oh, that's FLDS land or that's our land, I felt like I had to say something because

while they may hold ownership of it in the legal context that exists today, it's still

the homeland and territory of various tribes.

Specifically, the Yut, Paiute and Pueblo and Dene people in the land, their short creek.

The ancestors of those tribes have been in that area for thousands and thousands of years.

They had and still have intimate knowledge of that land and relationships with the land

that is not often understood by those outside of the tribal communities.

These are the descendants of the people who knew how to live in a hard land.

Then you had to subsist and survive in that area.

They developed trade networks and innovated and adapted to the land.

So when we discuss and tell a story of any community in the United States,

I think it is so important to also talk about in two, the people who were dispossessed

in order for that community to exist.

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