Jacob and Dylan on Native American Heritage Month

Dylan: Happy Native American heritage months fellow students! This is Jacob Pixton and Dylan Comfort from the sophomore class asking you to remember the significance of the land we are on today and to keep in mind the duality of our Thanksgiving holiday.

Dylan: My Native American heritage is important to me because I believe it is important to acknowledge and celebrate my own heritage. It's imperative to look and see what has happened to my own people in the past and reflect on the important and tragic events that happened with them. People usually just celebrate Thanksgiving and think about just eating food with their family when it is important to also look back on the history and how tragic it was for the Native Americans when their population got wiped out purposely by diseases.

Dylan: My personal experience at Lincoln overall as a Native American is usually positive. The only thing is I feel we don’t acknowledge it as much as we should because we are on the stolen land of Native Americans. So for me, I think land acknowledgment is a big step in the right direction.


Jacob: Something important Dylan and I had discussed was opening up your Thanksgiving meals with a land acknowledgment. At the dedication of the new Lincoln building, the following land acknowledgement was given:

“The tribes to be acknowledged that exist in Oregon today are:

Burns Paiute Tribe
Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Suislaw Indians
Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde
Confederated Tribes of Siletz
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
Coquille Indian Tribe
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians
Klamath Tribe

I ask you to join me in acknowledging these communities, those that existed in the past and those that exist today. In the reconstruction of this institution, let us acknowledge that it was founded upon exclusion and erasures of many indigenous peoples, including those on whose land we are standing upon today. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment from Lincoln High School to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies and ideologies of settler colonialism.”

Jacob: We believe that acknowledging the land we are on today is a step in the right direction for forwarding along with the correct narrative of what had actually happened to Native American people, and recognizing the repercussions Native American communities are still facing today.

Lincoln prides itself in being aware of the duality of history, so we hope that as Lincoln students you all will be able to reflect on this tragic narrative often skipped over in history books over the break and remain conscious of what we are celebrating and for what reasons.