Back in grad school, I was asked to give a territorial acknowledgment at the start of a meeting. I had never heard a territorial acknowledgment before moving to Canada: in certain circles, they’re a very common Canadian practice. Even as they’re gaining ground here in the US, there’s increasing criticism of land acknowledgments as performative and even harmful, especially when the speaker or writer bungles names, terms, and concepts.
In my experience, there are two different kinds of land acknowledgments. One is big and elaborate: it’s a presentation, a ceremony, a discussion, something that educates the listener or reader and invites them to think deeply about their position and includes a call to action. This type of acknowledgment takes time, maybe a lot of time, to produce, and involves some hefty research and preparation. It’s what I wrote, and I include it below for your reference. The other kind is short and perfunctory: someone stands up in front of crowd, reads a few lines off a sheet of paper that they probably copied from the internet, and then sits back down again. It’s fast and easy to put together and honestly pretty cringeworthy.
This post is mostly just a roundup of resources I used to write my land acknowledgement, but I want to take a moment to offer a few of my own thoughts about land acknowledgments.
It should be obvious that the cringe-y read-off-a-piece-of-paper kind of acknowledgement should be avoided at all cost. If you don’t have the time to do it right, don’t do it at all: such indifference is more insulting than silence. Worse still is dishonesty. If you are only giving an acknowledgment because you are required to, if you don’t believe in the words—or the work—then you insult not only the Indigenous people you claim to acknowledge, but also your audience and yourself.
A brief acknowledgement need not be perfunctory, especially if it is honest and heartfelt. Put down the paper or the cue cards, look away from your PowerPoint slide, whatever—just talk to your audience about what’s important to you. It’s better to say, “this is the ancestral of land of many tribes and nations whose names I don’t have memorized” than to read off a long list of names in a stumbling monotone. A short acknowledgement, by necessity, has a different role than a longer one: it’s job is spark thought, interest, and curiosity rather than to educate, inform, or discuss; it’s there to disrupt and challenge rather than guide and engage. Lean into that.
Is a land acknowledgment right for you? That’s a controversial question. This article from Vox offers an example of a real-world bar that offers a perfunctory acknowledgement on its menu, but could hypothetically rise above mere performance by donating proceeds to a nonprofit that benefits Native youth. It’s a great example of how a business can pair a land acknowledgment with meaningful action. But what if the bar is already donating money to help Black youth? Or a local houseless shelter? Or a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs of color? There are so many good causes to support. Each one is important in its own way, but no one person, household, or business can support them all. Of course an Indigenous filmmaker being interviewed by Vox about land acknowledgements is going to suggest an Indigenous cause take top priority. But what would a Black farmer say? A Latinx fashion designer? Maybe you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or, frankly, passion to put together a great land acknowledgment, and maybe that’s ok. Just as long as you do what you can where you can.
Native Governance Center:
https://nativegov.org/a-guide-to-indigenous-land-acknowledgment/
Indigenous territory map and blog:
https://native-land.ca/category/community-blog/
Pronounciation guide for First Nations in British Columbia:
Here’s the land acknowledgment I wrote:
I was tapped to give the territorial acknowledgement last month, but was unable to do so because I was wrapping up the last of my fieldwork. Now that my fieldwork has been successfully wrapped, I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional lands, not just of the nations where I live and do my “office work” here in Burnaby, but also where I have done my fieldwork.
My research has taken me into some pretty remote forest in the lower mainland and sunshine coast. It can be tempting to think of these forests as unchanged and unchanging places of pristine nature, and that myth is one colonizers have always found convenient because it gives them an excuse to seize “empty” or “unused” land. But of course these forests have been altered and managed by humans for millennia.
Of course, the most common sign of management is modern and very obvious: big, ugly clearcuts. But an older and more subtle sign is the presence of culturally modified trees. If you aren’t familiar with CMTs, as they’re referred to, these are living trees which have been altered by indigenous people as part of traditional forestry practices. The kind I saw most often were cedars with a vertical scar along their trunk where a long strip of bark had been pulled free.
If you know anything about indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, you know cedar is kind of a big deal. It’s used to make everything from clothing to canoes, and is the most common tree used to make totem poles. Harvesting cedar bark in strips, when done right, does very little damage to the tree and leaves it alive and healthy.
Although indigenous practices like bark harvest continue today, this kind of traditional forestry has little or no place in conventional forest management. Indigenous people are largely excluded from forestry, interacting with the industry as stakeholders rather than managers. As of 2017, less than 12% of timber tenures, which allow an organization to harvest trees on crown lands, were held by First Nations in BC. (About 95% of the timber in BC is publicly owned.)
They’re also excluded from the science that informs good forest management. Indigenous people make up a tiny fraction of biologists and researchers, something we’ve discussed while planning our BIPOC scholarship. And much of the research that takes place on their lands, current or traditional, rarely does more than “consult” with Indigenous communities—if that. And so I would like to acknowledge the nations on whose land I have conducted research, including the Shíshálh (see-shelt), Lil’wat (lil-watt), Stó:lō (staw-low), and Nlaka’pamux (ent-la-cap-um) nations, along with others I’m sure I have missed. And of course, I also live and work on unceded Coast Salish territory, including the traditional territories of the Musqueam (mus-kwee-um), Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh (sail-wha-tooth), and Kwikwetlem (kwee-wet-lum) Nations.
Bird, Wandering 