SFWA humbly honors and celebrates the strength, resilience, and wisdom of our Indigenous neighbors, friends, and relatives. The Santa Fe River Watershed is within the past, present, and future homelands of the Tewa, Keres, and Towa Pueblos, and the Apache. It is significant to numerous other Peoples including the Tiwa Pueblos, the Diné, the Ute, and the Comanche.
It is a storied landscape holding many places with many names, including the Tewa name for where our office is located: O’gah P’ogeh Owingeh, White Shell Water Place.
We honor that the headwaters of the Santa Fe River flow from Lake Peak, one of the most sacred mountains in the expansive geography of the Southwest, and that the Santa Fe River flows into the Rio Grande, the orienting artery for all Pueblo people and many others.
We grieve the layers and centuries of oppression and displacement that are etched into the land, water, ecologies, and cultures of this place that continue to be perpetuated through both systemic colonial structures and everyday actions that often unknowingly perpetuate this legacy.
We commit to working to center Indigenous voices, to learn and unlearn, to collaborate and reciprocate, to honor both Indigenous expertise and privacy, and to infuse our work with the ethics of humility, justice, and liberation.
We set this public intention to be accountable to and encourage the accountability of our community members as we continue this process.
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Additional Resources/Donation Suggestions (a beginning):
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women
Pueblo Watersheds: Places, Cycles and Life, by Rina Swentzell in Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West (book)
