We, the board, staff, and artists of the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, gratefully acknowledge that the home office of SF Shakes sits on the
unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush Ohlone have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we have benefited from living and working on their traditional homeland, and we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples. We encourage all who live and work on this land to educate ourselves about the Ramaytush Ohlone via their website, ramaytush.com, and to support their ongoing decolonizing and re-indigenization efforts.
As a Shakespeare company, we also recognize that the works of Shakespeare have been used to cause harm to indigenous nations and to eradicate and replace their native languages. We have a particular responsibility to address and repair this harm by naming it in our educational and performance work, and lifting up the voices that the dominance of Shakespeare’s work has displaced from our stages and our classrooms.