Land Acknowledgement

Between our team, the central components of our work at Rest Day Creative take place on land that was originally and still is inhabited by Indigenous people, including:

The village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

The tribal lands of the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples in the area of what is known as Los Angeles.

The lands and territorities of the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo in the area currently known as Texas.

Indigenous culture, stories, and wisdom are wholly worth celebrating, looking to, and honoring as sources that are invaluable additions to our own knowledge and ways of understanding and relating. These people and their descendants are the original stewards of the land we’re on and the waters connected to them. For that, we’re immensely grateful, and we are in continual learning to listen and follow through based on what we receive.

And while it’s important to honor and pay respect to the elders and descendants of these populations, which we hope to do here, it’s also essential to acknowledge that our presence here wouldn’t be the case without imperial colonization on the part of settlers, resulting in genocide, seizure of land, slavery, subjugation, relocation and government displacement, family separation, forced colonial education, religious indoctrination, spread of disease, and embedded, long-lasting generational trauma.

We wish that wasn’t the case, but it simply is, and it’s worth being clear-eyed with the truth.

A land acknowledgment can start as one of many reparative steps extended to Indigenous people to acknowledge what is so often the erasure of violence — but it should never end there.

Accountability Toward Change

Our statement is public accountability for our responsibility to the healing and tangible action that is needed, because the privileges we are afforded by being on these lands come from violence and we actively benefit from them by being here.

Financial Reparations

Beyond education and lifting Indigenous voices, reparation looks like real resources making their way back into the communities they were taken from. As a company, that’s financial reparation, but it can also look like land back initiatives to return land back to Indigenous people, either individually or through pushing support for governments at local, state, and federal levels to give land back, and through giving time and skills to Indigenous-led causes and movements.

Financial reparations matter because the numbers show they do. Indigenous organizations only receive $0.23 cents out of every $100 of philanthropic giving in the United States (source), and for every $1 of wealth owned by a white person in the U.S., an Indigenous person has $0.08 cents (source). This disparity is directly related to the colonial displacement, violence, and erasure of these people, and is worth rectifying in all the ways we can, including understanding how we are complicit in its continuation.

Our Commitment in Practice

5% of all of our earnings go to reparations and financial redistribution for causes and organizations, including financial reparation and support for Indigenous orgs. As team members, we also can give directly to Indigenous mutual aid funds.