The Baird Center and the City of Milwaukee sit on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires — the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations — as well as the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and Peoria peoples. We honor and respect the many Indigenous nations whose stewardship of this region predates and continues alongside the institutions and gatherings of today.
We extend this acknowledgement as a beginning, not an ending. As a society devoted to the disciplines of language and literature, we recognize that words matter — and that an acknowledgement, read aloud, is one step in a longer conversation about how convention gatherings, member institutions, and the Society itself engage with Indigenous communities, scholarship, and writers.