Land & Place

The Mountain School gathers to do its work on the unceded traditional lands of the Abenaki Nation of the N’Dakinna territory now called Vermont, land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among indigenous peoples for thousands of years and is the home of the Western Abenaki People. We acknowledge the Abenaki community, their elders both past and present as well as future generations, as the traditional stewards of the lands and waters on which we gather. We also acknowledge that the Mountain School, Vershire, Vermont, and the United States were founded upon exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous people, including those whose lands we are on now: the place the Abenaki Nation calls the Dawnland. This acknowledgement is only one small step in a broader project of reparation.

We are grateful to Carol McGranaghan, Chair, Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs, and Don Stevens, Chief of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk-Abenaki Nation, for offering us the language with which to make this land acknowledgement. 

The Mountain School campus consists of living, learning, working, and farming structures, garden beds and animal pasture, maintained trails, and forested land from which we harvest firewood and maple syrup, on 418 acres of rolling hills.