Welcome back to this bi-weekly meeting of the Budget and Policy Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the discussion as the Budget and Policy Committee starts now.

Thank you.

Sorry about that.

I was finishing up a call.

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to Budget and Policy on Feb Monday.

February 9th. We'll get started with council introductions and then we can

start. I'll start with my left. I'm Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval. Good afternoon.

Daryl Watson, Fine District 9. Laura Alvitres, Lucky District 7. Chantal Lewis, District 8.

Sarah Parity, one of your council members at large. Hello, Sedona Gonzalez-

Kuchanas, your other council member at large. Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's

District 2. Stacey Gilmore, District 11. Good afternoon, Diana Romero-

Campbell Southeast Denver District 4 Jamie Torres West Denver District 3

hey Denver Chris Hines Denver's perfect tent great we have two briefings before

us today we have CPD here with us and then we have a by Councilmember Lewis

up next. So we have 42 slides. We have 45 minutes. I can go quickly. Okay. The next one we'll need to

have a little bit more time. The floor is yours. Cynthia, just introduce yourself. Sure. I'm Abby

Christman, Principal City Planner with Landmark Preservation and Community Planning and Development.

And I'm here today to talk about the We Are the Land project.

So this project was kind of co-led by me and my colleague, Becca Deershow.

But Becca Deershow is out on leave, so that is why you were only getting me today.

Just want to make sure that I acknowledge she put in an equal amount of the work.

So today I am going to go through what is We Are the Land, what were the parts of this project,

the community role, why we felt it was essential to center Native voices, our timeline and funding,

some highlights of what we heard from the community, community recommendations for the

city of Denver moving forward, and then what's next. So what is We Are the Land? We Are the Land

is an oral history project that centers American Indian voices to tell a fuller story of Denver,

one that didn't begin with the city's founding and didn't end with removal. It's a collaboration

between Landmark Preservation, Denver's American Indian community, and representatives from tribal

nations that have ongoing cultural and historical ties to the city to document living history,

traditional knowledge, and contemporary American Indian life. So this is the second in our Denver

in Context series. The goal of the series is to recognize and honor all those who have been part

of Denver's history, celebrating diverse cultures, and acknowledging tragic histories. Doing this by

connecting with the community, identifying significant places, elevating and sharing

stories, and then producing thematic context, like our big fat context that we have produced

for this project. So what is a historic context? It's a preservation term. It generally is talking

about documents that are really trying to tie stories, the stories of how a place, how

it developed, why it developed, where it developed with the built environment. So it's trying

to tell the history, but also tie it to the landscape around us. Explore how political,

social, cultural, and economic trends have shaped our built environment. And for this

project, we were definitely pushed by the community to really look beyond the built

environment and also really consider Denver as a cultural landscape or as an indigenous landscape.

And the goal of a context then is also to provide the tools we need to evaluate potential eligibility

of sites and landscapes for designation and to raise community awareness of history.

So the different parts of our project. So first off just a little bit about who was doing this

work, so our project team and roles. So Landmark was the lead on this. Our mighty team of three

people did all the project management, grant writing and administration, community engagement.

We organized tribal convenings. We provided research assistance. We wrote a national register

nomination, and we did a lot of context editing and revisions. Then we had Project Mosaic, who are

our indigenous consultants, and they provided engagement support, facilitation for events.

They did all the oral histories.

They provided kind of cultural competency lessons for us and also wrote the first and

last chapters of the context.

And then we worked with ERO Resources who kind of took what they heard from the community,

the oral histories, put those into a framework, and then did additional research around that

and wrote six chapters of the context.

So community engagement was really key. We tried to make sure that we were actively involving the community in the project and that we were doing that throughout the project.

So we had a variety of events throughout the project.

We were at Denver March Pow Wow for the last three years and will be there again this year.