Social Justice: Land acknowledgements

By Naj Siritsky, RSW

When I first arrived in Mi’kma’ki, after years of living in Shawnee, Cherokee, Osage, Seneca-Iroquois, Miami, Hopewell and Adena land (now also called Kentucky), I was deeply struck by the practice of land acknowledgments which is almost nonexistent in most parts of what is now called the United States of America. Not long after, I began learning of the New Brunswick government’s decision to prevent its employees from making land acknowledgments that reference the unceded territory upon which they are located.

There is tremendous power – and deep legal implications – in this practice.

Every word matters.

For the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers, the long and necessary process of continuing to refine our land acknowledgment praxis has provided us with opportunities to learn and grow in our organizational and professional commitment to working toward reconciliation. With each conversation and each iteration, we reaffirm our acknowledgment that this is Mi’kmaw land, and the land is crucial to Indigenous identity. The land holds histories, stories, songs, ceremonies, food, and medicine. Including recognition that the land is unceded and that its original nation is unconquered also acknowledges the genocidal history and broken relationships between Indigenous peoples and Canada.

In preparing for this issue of Connection, our final issue before we transition to a virtual magazine that will help us be better stewards of the earth’s precious natural resources, we met with several social workers to reflect upon the things that every social worker ought to consider when preparing to make a land acknowledgment.

We are grateful to the following social workers who met with us to help prepare this article: Craig Besaw, RSW, Dominic Boyd, RSW, Crystal Hill, RSW. We asked them: if you had to give guidance to a new social work student of settler descent who was just beginning to learn how to give land acknowledgments, what would you want them to understand?

We share some of their insights in appreciation for their wisdom and guidance:

“For land acknowledgements, there has to be a substance to the words, not just the hollow echo of the words. There has to be a commitment to action and change. We need to change the way we view the land, and our relationship to it”. Sometimes, too much gets put into a land acknowledgment and the land itself gets lost. Sometimes, people turn it into a political statement, or it becomes divisive, or it becomes a long list of the consequences of colonization.

Unfortunately, people begin to “add things to a land acknowledgement, which are not land acknowledgements” which makes it feel like the land is “not enough,” unto itself, to acknowledge. In that situation, where we begin to acknowledge other issues or dynamics, it can feel like “the land’s importance is being erased all over again.”

Often people seem uncomfortable in making the land acknowledgment or it seems like someone is “reading from a script” or it seems “performative” rather than genuine. “If it’s done right, it feels healing. If it’s pronounced wrong, it doesn’t. But if it’s done right, you can tell if it’s done with a level of compassion or if it’s just blurted out quickly and moved on.”

“Indigenous people don’t do land acknowledgements because we know where we are, we know our land. Having the land acknowledgement done by a non-Indigenous person is part of the work of reconciliation.”

“Part of the acknowledgment has to be an invitation for reflection on one’s relationship with the land. The statement has to be an invitation and can also be a “time for ‘breath work’ because that is part of the necessary work of decolonization. We live in a society where many people are uncomfortable with silence.” We need to learn to make the acknowledgement into something that can “impact our behaviors and have some visceral meaning to us internally.”

The land acknowledgment “should not traumatize people listening to it”, but rather bring people back to the solid foundation of the earth upon which we are located, as our shared starting point. It should move us to a place of gratitude for “the shared resources of this land covered by the treaties of Peace and Friendship” and inspire in us a commitment to protect it.

Acknowledging the land and reflecting upon one’s personal relationship to it, as well as committing to learning more about it, are important ways to show respect and engage in the necessary work of reconciliation. As social workers, we have a unique responsibility to understand what was done and do what we can to work toward decolonization due to the ways that we participated in, and indeed, continue to participate in policies whose goal is to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land.

Learning more about how to do a land acknowledgment is only the first step: it must translate into a larger awareness.

For example, our government’s systemic effort to erase the Mi’kmaw language was another strategy of dispossession and cultural genocide. But we can begin to learn how to pronounce the names of the Mi’kmaw lands where we are located, and learn to switch our linguistic habits. Instead of saying Halifax or Cape Breton when we are speaking, we can choose to say Kjipuktuk or Unama’ki. Such decisions are everyday ways that we can begin to transform the moment of the land acknowledgment into behaviors that we integrate into our daily lives, and hopefully educate more people about this beautiful land upon which we all live and work.

NAJ SIRITSKY is the professional practice & advocacy consultant at the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers.