Land Acknowledgement

In so many ways, this project is about recognizing how settler colonialism is ongoing. One of the ways in which settler colonialism has been able to keep going is by allying itself with notions of innocence—to make its violence seem impossible.

And one of the ways that settler colonialism might ally itself with innocence is by impelling settlers (ourselves included) to offer land acknowledgements. The logic, of course, is that if settlers acknowledge Indigenous land and sovereignty, then we must be ‘on their team,’ and if we are on their team, then we must not be so bad: we must, in other words, be innocent. In this way, land acknowledgements can be dangerous. In fact, Indigenous thinkers (e.g., Sarah Hunt [Kwakwaka’wakw], Lee Maracle [Stó:lō]) have pointed to the potential problems and limitations of land acknowledgements. Here, then, we offer a land acknowledgement, while at the same time drawing your attention to what it leaves out, to its gaps.

The settler colonial city of Calgary (on which this research is focused) is built on the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprised of the Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations (including Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First Nations), whose territories are governed by Treaty 7, as well as the Métis Nation of Alberta Region 3. The city now called “Calgary” is actually a many-named place—Moh’kins’tsis to the Blackfoot, Wîchîspa to the Iyarhe Nakoda, and Guts’ists’i to the Tsuut’ina—and it is home to urban Indigenous communities, too, whose members are often from different places across Turtle Island. What is more, Indigenous Peoples were living in “Calgary,” and all across so-called Alberta—on lands beyond Calgary, on the traditional territories of the Athabasca Chipewyan Nation, Bigstone Cree Nation, Dene Tha’ Nation, Frog Lake First Nation, and so many more—at least 11,000 years prior to European explorers’ arrival. Indigenous life is not an abstract concept; Indigenous people are not gone: both are real and present, today and right now, in Calgary, Alberta, and beyond.

But what exists between this act, just now, of land acknowledgement, on the one hand, and actual decolonization? What is it that gets us to land acknowledgements, but not, say, to land back? What lives in the gap?