Shakespeare at Winedale Land Acknowledgement

We respectfully acknowledge the ancestral land upon which the University of Texas at Austin campus and the Winedale Historical Campus sits in Central Texas.  This is the occupied territory of the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas. 

We recognize the people who resided here and that the spirit of their people permeates this soil. We pay respects to their elders, past and present.

We also acknowledge the unpaid labor and forced servitude of enslaved Africans and their descendants, whose unremitted labor and exploitation were pivotal to the rapid economic growth of our nation and who face ongoing oppression, racism, and violence.  We acknowledge the history of Winedale and the Theater Barn itself.  We recognize the eleven unnamed enslaved individuals who were noted as living on the Samuel K. Lewis (owner of the Winedale Inn) farmstead in the Fayette County Census in 1860.  We also acknowledge that according to a 1960s architectural survey, the frame of the theatre barn was built with lumber recycled from a cotton gin and a cotton press from the land’s previous use as a Southern plantation on which enslaved people labored.

The Shakespeare at Winedale program recognizes the broken promises and harm done to the First Peoples of these lands, the horrors of American slavery, and the painful legacies of inequity that continue to persist.

We are indebted to former Winedale student Dr. Johnny M. Meyer for his research into the history of Winedale and his pursuit of recognition for these injustices.  For more information, members of the Winedale community can read his paper, “‘Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:’ the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography,” published in Multicultural Shakespeare in 2022.  We gratefully acknowledge the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin for providing a framework for this statement.