Land Acknowlegment

Tara Rivera Counseling, PLLC is located in Black Diamond, Washington, on the traditional homelands of the Coast Salish peoples. The land where I do this work was historically home to the Bəqəlšuł, a Lushootseed name meaning "from a high point from which you can see", who fished, gathered, and lived along the shores of Lake Sawyer long before this town had that name. This place sits within the broader traditional territory of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, whose ancestors and relations, including the Duwamish, stewarded the Green and White River watersheds for countless generations before treaties, coal mining, and settlement reshaped this land.

I encourage you to learn more about the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and the Duwamish Tribe, and to support Indigenous-led work in this region.

To me, acknowledging this land and doing decolonizing food and body work are not two separate commitments; they're the same commitment, applied at different scales. Colonization didn't only take land. It took foodways, body knowledge, and healing practices, and it replaced them with the same Eurocentric, white-supremacist standards that still shape how bodies are judged and how "health" gets defined in this country. The forces that displaced the Bəqəlšuł and the Muckleshoot people from this land are the same forces that severed so many communities, Indigenous and otherwise, from their ancestral relationship with food and body.

So when I do Decolonizing Food and Body™ work with a client, I'm asking them to reconnect with wisdom that colonization tried to erase, much like a land acknowledgment asks a community to reconnect with a history it was 

Why does this matter?

"Healing your relationship with food starts with unlearning who taught you to fear it."

taught to forget. Neither is complete as words alone. I hold myself accountable to learning, to supporting Indigenous-led organizations and food sovereignty efforts, and to letting that accountability show up in how I practice, who I learn from, and who I support, not just in what's written on this page.

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