Land & Peoples Acknowledgement
Gemma Smyth
Land Acknowledgement
The bulk of this text was written on the traditional territories of the Three Fires Confederacy consisting of the Odawa, Ojibwe and Potowatami peoples (Windsor, Ontario, Canada). Others parts were written on Treaty 6 territory, and the homeland of the Métis people. The various contributors to this text have written from many territories across Turtle Island.
This texts begins with a land acknowledgement. While land acknowledgements can a very small part of working towards respectful nation-to-nation relationships, they can also do harm. Without deeper engagement, land acknowledgements can become performative acts. For critical perspectives on land acknowledgements see Jeffery G. Hewitt, “Land Acknowledgement, Scripting and Julius Caesar” (2019) 88 The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference 88. Part of land acknowledgement is the act of ongoing accountability and, perhaps, reconciliation. As Chelsea Vowel writes,
“If we think of territorial acknowledgments as sites of potential disruption, they can be transformative acts that to some extent undo Indigenous erasure. I believe this is true as long as these acknowledgments discomfit both those speaking and hearing the words. The fact of Indigenous presence should force non-Indigenous peoples to confront their own place on these lands.”
Chelsea Vowel, Métis, “Beyond Territorial Acknowledgements” (Blog post, “Apihtawikosisan: Law, Language, Culture” (September 25, 2016), online: https://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/?
Clint Burnham’s poem (excerpt below) captures the specificity, pain, honesty and discomfort that might also accompany acknowledgment.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on borrowed land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on overdue land.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on pickpocketed land.
* * *
I’d like to acknowledge academic colonialism.
I’d like to acknowledge activist colonialism.
I’d like to acknowledge that we are on bureaucratic land.
I’d like to acknowledge poetic colonialism.
I’d like to acknowledge drinking a glass of water ten minutes
ago and not having to boil the water first.
I’d like to acknowledge the ice on the inside of the walls when
I lived in
Labrador in the 1970s as part of the military occupation of
Innu/Inuit/Indian land.
I’d like to acknowledge not having mould in my son’s room.
Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement” (2019) 177 Canadian Theatre Review pp. 20-30.
Acknowledgement of Enslavement & Resistance
Windsor, Ontario, Canada was a passageway along the Underground Railroad through which Freedom Seekers travelled. The history and mythology of the Underground Railroad can act to erase the a complicated and painful history of oppression of Black, African American and African Canadian people on this land which continues today.
For a fulsome examination of the history of slavery and the people who travelled across the Detroit River see Karolyn Smardz Frost and Vera Smith Tucker eds, A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (Wayne State University Press: MI, 2016). For more information about Black history in Windsor and Detroit, please visit the Amherstburg Freedom Museum and The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
