How do I approach doing land acknowledgments?
Research the history of the people on whose lands you currently live and have previously lived.
- Resources such as Native-Land.ca are a good starting point to learn on which lands you reside, but are not exhaustive. You should do further research and explore in more detail the oral and lived cultures and histories of Indigenous Peoples and communities.
- Make sure you know how to correctly pronounce the names of different nations. Writing the names phonetically can help with your pronunciation of the terms when speaking.
Implicate yourself, speak to who your people are, to the identities you hold, and to whose lands you and your ancestors have lived on.
- This isn’t an opportunity to talk about yourself at length, but rather a moment to learn how to announce yourself and your positionality respectfully. This resource on positionality from the What I Learned in Class Today project provides some useful prompts to help you think through your positionality.
- Research, think about, and address how you benefit from occupying stolen land. An example of this would be to first research how your field of study, area of research, or how Western science in general is inherently colonial and dismisses Indigenous ways of knowing and living.
Land acknowledgements should be meaningful and authentic.
- When learning how to deliver meaningful land acknowledgements, it will require that you spend time thinking about it, that you bring self/emotion into it, and that you back up the acknowledgement with action. Simply reciting a one line acknowledgement without indicating action may actually do more harm than good.
Be open to being corrected and learning from your acknowledgements. Growth and humility are extremely important in this space.
For additional information and facilitation materials, see Module 1: Where are we? How did we get here? from the in/relation project developed by CTLT Indigenous Initiatives.
