USM Portland Campus

We acknowledge the land and water that the University of Southern Maine campuses occupy, as well as the ancestral and contemporary peoples indigenous to these places in the Dawnland. Campus lands were the ancestral fishing, hunting, and agricultural grounds inhabited by the Abenaki and Wabanaki people for thousands of years.

We recognize that we are on indigenous land. In addition to the Abenaki, the broader place we now call Maine is home to the sovereign people of the Wabanaki Confederacy: the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq peoples. We exist on their unceded homelands.

We also acknowledge the uncomfortable truths of settler colonialism, among them that the peoples indigenous to this place were often forcibly removed from this place. Harm from the physical and cultural genocide of Native people here and throughout the land we now call Maine continues and is felt by members of the Wabanaki Confederacy who live here today, including our own Wabanaki students, staff, and faculty.

To participate in the healing process, please visit the organization Wabanaki REACH at mainewabanakireach.org. We all have work to do.