In many parts of the world, the majority of the population of a country or region is not indigenous to that area. This is true for Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, for example. In these countries, it is customary to acknowledge that we are living and working on Indigenous lands.
The idea behind land acknowledgments is to increase awareness of the fact that colonization is a brutal, genocidal process that destroys cultures and languages, displaces people from their traditional lands, and often kills Indigenous people, forces them to live on polluted lands, and causes many other forms of intergenerational trauma.
For example, I add the following to my email signature:
I am located on the Haldimand Tract, part of the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
You can find a similar land acknowledgment on this website.
Before you start writing your land acknowledgment, think about why you are doing it, and what you will do to support Indigenous organizations and grass-roots initiatives. Find out about the history and current status of the Indigenous People on whose land you live and work. Each region has a different history, and the land acknowledgment for the region where you live is different depending on that history.
Don’t just copy and paste an existing land acknowledgment, and be aware that there are many different First Nations with overlapping territories, so one region’s land acknowledgment will be different than that of its neighbouring region.
An excellent resource for finding out which nations live (or lived) on the land where you live and work is Native-Land.ca. You can zoom in on the area where you live and see which nations’ territories overlap it. Clicking on the name of the nation will take you to more information about their history, and in some cases, a suggested land acknowledgment.
Leave a Reply