October 10th, 2022
By: Marcos Marquez, Clear Impact Equity Lead

As we add our voices to those celebrating Indigenous People’s Day, we first pause to ground our words in humility, respect, gratitude, and accountability. May the words that follow be filled with authenticity.

Today, as individuals who work at Clear Impact, we acknowledge that our very lives are built upon the ancestral lands of indigenous people. To the East, North, South, and West of the United States of America, myriad communities of First Nation people thrived in a highly complex set of political and economic relationships. These people and their ways of life were forever threatened, challenged, disrupted, deceived, and decimated by civilizations that failed to recognize the social, political, and economic structures that characterized indigenous ways of being and life. Rather than equitable treatment as sovereign entities, indigenous nations, tribes, and bands were systematically divested of rights and privileges, especially as it relates to political and economic power, in the developing country that we are now part of. Their lands and ways of life were taken from them without legal, economic, or political justice. The trajectories of their entire peoples were irrevocably changed.

This is difficult to acknowledge, yet it can never speak to the enduring pain of indigenous peoples throughout the United States whose very lives, histories, and cultures experienced lasting consequences. Who can imagine where indigenous people might stand today had their populations, lands, and cultures remained intact in the United States? What would thriving indigenous communities look like?

We acknowledge these historical injustices and their consequences, enduring hardships experienced amongst indigenous peoples and societies. We point to the fundamental inequities that continue to persist amongst the peoples of First Nation tribes – challenges in terms of health, safety, education, economic development, and wealth creation. These inequities are systematically ingrained on federal, regional, state, county, and local levels. These inequities also transcend political barriers as they permeate the very groundwater across our country.

We stand committed to addressing these issues by supporting indigenous communities as they determine and actualize solutions that help them to build agency and prosperity. We stand committed to systems across the United States that are working to reverse the levers of oppression and exploitation. And we ourselves commit to taking action by first listening to indigenous peoples, acknowledging our own privilege, and working as hard as we can as allies in advancing equity for indigenous peoples across the USA.