I’m grateful to have participated last Saturday in the local event “Broomfield: The American Dream in a War-Torn World,” organized by the Broomfield Resettlement Task Force. The event featured three groups of panelists who shared portions of their stories (and their families stories) on conflict-related challenges and other difficulties they encountered in leaving places like Japan, Vietnam, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Venezuela for the United States and Broomfield.
I helped kick off the evening with an extended land acknowledgement of the Native peoples that have lived on this land since time immemorial, with a particular focus on the Arapaho and the Cheyenne tribes and their ties to this area. I reminded those in attendance that in the 1860s our own area was “war-torn” and that the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were forced by U.S. settlers and by the Sand Creek Massacre to become refugees from their homelands. Special thanks to David Allison and the Broomfield History Collections team for their permission to play the audio clips, originally recorded for the Broomfield Out Loud project in October 2023. The clips featured portions of interviews with Southern Arapaho elder Fred Mosqueda and Cheyenne and Arapaho elder Frank Medicine Water.
Many thanks to the event’s partners and attendees!
