Territorial Acknowledgement
For Indigenous peoples, land acknowledgements honour the territory of diverse communities by recognizing the relationship that exists between the people and land. They also illustrate the way that Indigenous communities practice values of respect and etiquette when visiting a territory that is not their home.
Wemigwans and MacKay
(2023, 4)
Acknowledging the Indigenous territories we are situated within has increasingly become a standard practice at post-secondary and community events. Beyond simply reading the official territorial acknowledgment of their given institution, faculty are encouraged to understand how and why we give acknowledgement and to develop thoughtful and reflexive acknowledgements when used. However, giving a territorial or land acknowledgement is complicated by the critiques of how these practices have become institutionalized and evacuated of their meaning.
Acknowledging the land that a university occupies or that a gathering takes place on through naming the people who are in Indigenous relationship to that land is a growing social justice practice. Universities are settler institutions in that they occupy Indigenous lands as a result of the growth of property and public space facilitated by modern nation-states.
Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang
(2021, 22)
When acknowledgements are given within a university context in a repeated recitation of the institution’s official statement, especially by non-Indigenous members, it can reinforce the settler colonial power structures that shape the relationship between educational institutions and Indigenous peoples and communities (King 2019).
Considering the havoc that has been created by settlers through the institutionalization of land acknowledgements, we look to Indigenous knowledge systems and practices that teach the necessary ontological orientation of relationality through the practice of gratitude with the human and more-than-human world. We imagine this as a way of cultivating land-based education that centres Indigenous knowledge that includes an unsettling of settler colonialism to support and honour the practice of land acknowledgements as it has always been intended.
To address the above critiques and limitations of non-Indigenous territorial or land acknowledgements, many groups have suggested more thoughtful approaches to crafting and giving acknowledgement. For instance, according to Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “settler land acknowledgments are not the same as Indigenous protocols… What kinds of relationships do settler acknowledgments actually name? What impacts do practitioners and advocates for acknowledgments hope these statements will have? What impacts do these practices actually have?” (2021, 28).
Online resources, such as native-land.ca, propose similar questions and offer more detailed prompts for building acknowledgements.
While a brief acknowledgement may work for some groups, others wish to add more intention a