Day 1. Honoring the First Light – The Land as Our First Relative.
Before we were human, we were soil, water, and light. The land has always known us – shaping our breath, nourishing our ancestors, and holding our stories in its layers. For Indigenous peoples across the world, the land is not a thing to be owned, but a relative to be in relationship with.
As Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes,
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
In many Indigenous creation stories, humans are the youngest siblings of Creation. We are taught to listen – to the rivers that carry memory, to the stones that remember fire, to the wind that carries ancestral songs. This worldview stands in powerful contrast to colonial systems that severed human and ecological kinship. To heal the earth, we must first remember our belonging to it.
Unitarian Universalism, too, calls us into this relationship through our Seventh Principle: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” When we acknowledge the land during worship, we are not performing a ritual of guilt, we are entering into an ongoing covenant of care. A true land acknowledgment becomes an act of reciprocity: learning whose homelands we occupy, supporting Indigenous sovereignty, and living in gratitude for the Earth that sustains us all.
Learn More
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Native Land Digital – discover whose land you live on through this living and evolving interactive map. This is a space where stories of land and waters are carried by those who walk in ancestral relationship with them. This resource is essential for:
– Settlers encountering Indigenous place names and stories for the first time
– Indigenous people seeing their own nations reflected in ways rarely offered on Western maps
– Teachers and students using the Teacher’s Guide to deepen classroom conversations
Loving Practice: Before each meal or meeting this week, offer gratitude to the land and its original stewards.
As the first light rises each morning, may we remember that our first relationship is with this living Earth. May our love of justice and compassion extend not only to people, but to the soil beneath our feet and the sky that holds us all.
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