Today is our second annual Otoe-Missouria Day.
Our aim is to reconnect
with the people, the Otoe-Missouria people who were displaced
to make way for our city and our university.
They're the native nation
that ceded the land, that became our university and our city.
And we thought it was really important to reconnect with them
and not to just say, Oh, we acknowledge that this is Otoe-Missouria land.
But but to make a meaningful relationship
with them.
We think this is an important thing to do
to reconnect our community to its history.
I think there's a lot of educational value in that.
It's also a way to pay respect to the people who
whose lives were uprooted, you know, almost 200 years ago.
It's our way of trying to reconnect them to their ancestral homeland.
I think it's a very, very special experience, very spiritual for these people.
I'm glad to be a part of it.
I think it's a beautiful thing.
He says. In the middle.
He says, he puts his on the outside.
This way.
From the outside of this thing.
And so we wanted to make Native presence in Lincoln
at UNL much more visible.
So we got the idea to put up a couple of teepees
because a lot of our local Indian
community are from Plains Indian tribes that use teepees.
So we thought this would be a great way to both raise
awareness of those around us, but also to welcome the Otoes.
You can tell by looking at the lodge
What tribe did they come from?
So if you look at the tops of them, they have they look like a bonnet,
you know, or a headdress in the way that the poles come out.
And so you start with the tripod
you add each pole.
And at each pole, she would go around and tie that.
And that rope signifies the umbilicus
from your mother to you in utero.
And you run that rope through and then fastening back to the earth, establishing
that connection with your home, back to your grandmother, mother Earth.
We’re all about kind of empowerment and culture,
not just focusing kind of,
I guess, on the bad things about natives and, you know, we also want to celebrate.
So we're trying to do a lot of events like that this year.
So this is really up our alley for the kind of stuff
that UNITE wants to be a part of is just a celebration of our people.
This has been really healing for our local native community
and for our local non-native community.
For the Otoe-Missourias. I think that more and more
as we go along, we'll see more cities doing this kind of thing.
There's
really kind of a quiet movement taking place in America
where cities like Lincoln are welcoming back the displaced peoples
that once lived there.
And if we can help heal that wound
by bringing these people home and reconnecting them to these lands,
I think that's a very, very positive thing.