Small Steps, Taken Often
To begin a gathering with a land acknowledgement is to begin in a good way. Land acknowledgements honour the Indigenous Peoples on whose ancestral lands a gathering takes place and position the speaker in relation to the people and the land. Wherever we are, the land holds stories from cultures, histories, languages, and knowledges that were born long ago from the local Indigenous Peoples’ sacred relationship with the land. This sacred relationship is ongoing today and will continue into the future. As a settler-Canadian, I honour and respect the land and the Indigenous People where I live, work, learn, and play by learning about and engaging with local land protection initiatives and building renewed relationships with local Indigenous communities.
I live and work in Treaty 7 territory and the Homeland of the Métis Nations of Alberta, Region 3. Located in the heart of Southern Alberta, this beautiful land, where the Bow and Elbow Rivers converge, is known as Moh’kins’’tsis to the Blackfoot, Wîchîspa to the Stoney Nakoda, and Guts’ists’I to the Tsuut’ina. As a settler-Canadian, recognizing and lamenting the ongoing harms of settler-colonialism, I seek ways to build new relationships with Indigenous people and lands based on respect, reciprocity, truth-telling, and justice.
The practice of acknowledging the land is a reminder that Canada’s economic prosperity was built on unceded land and treaties with Indigenous Nations that the government of Canada dishonoured. Colonization was not a single event; it is an ongoing process of silencing and rendering invisible Indigenous Peoples and their Ways of Knowing, Doing, Being, and Relating. If settlers are to repair our broken relationships with Indigenous People on the land where we live, then acknowledging the land is merely a small step with which to begin (Smith, 2019). It is in taking “small steps, often” (Colin Hunter in Rundle, 2019, minute 8:06), that we can hope to learn and be changed.
Locating Myself
I am a non-Indigenous, settler Canadian of Irish and Scottish ancestry. I was born and raised in Omàmìwininiwaq (Algonquin) and Anishinabewaki territories in the city that came to be known as Ottawa, in the province of Ontario (Native Land, 2021). As a child, I would not have been able to identify these lands. If pressed in my teens, I might have been able to say that Ottawa was on Algonquin land, but I did not receive a reliable education about the history and First Peoples on the land where I spent my early years. From what I now understand, Ottawa is part of Treaty 27 (dating back to 1819) and the Crawford Purchase (1783) (Native Land, 2021), but these treaties were unknown to me until recent years and my knowledge of them is still limited.
I spent most of my childhood and youth in Ottawa, the youngest daughter in a middle-class, suburban, nuclear family. My parents each had completed bachelor degrees and worked in full-time, professional jobs. They were married throughout my childhood. Long before we expected such a loss, my father passed away when I was in my 30s. Throughout my up-bringing, my parents provided a safe, healthy, and stable family life for my older sister and me, giving us many opportunities for learning and growing.
During summer holidays in my childhood, my family would visit my maternal grandmother’s house located in the small, rural community called Aroostook, New Brunswick, which I have since learned is on Wabanaki territory, part of the Dawnland Confederacy and part of the Peace and Friendship Treaty (Native Land, 2021). The time I spent in New Brunswick during my childhood holds great significance for me because my Nana and I were close and alike in many ways. The land around Nana’s house figures prominently in my memories of those summer days.
What Motivates Me?
I have lived a largely privileged life as a white, middle class, university educated, English-speaking, settler Canadian, with a Protestant, Christian background. In so many ways, I tick all the privilege boxes, perhaps with the exception of gender and sexual identity privileges. I am a cis gendered, queer woman; I have experienced systemic and individual sexism, misogyny, and homophobia throughout my life. I acknowledge my privilege and my experiences of systemic and individual oppression in order to provide some context for exploring what motivates me to engage in decolonizing practices. Living as a queer woman in a sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and heteronormative society is my experience of what it feels like to be ‘othered.’ I cannot compare this experience to what it might be like to be Indigenous in a settler colonial society. Nevertheless, both my privileges and my experiences as ‘other’ tune me into deep emotions and knowing right from wrong. It’s an accident of birth that I have white skin in a white supremist world. I did nothing to earn the privileges bestowed on white people. One of the troubles with systems like racism, white supremacy, and colonialism is that they just keep functioning as long as they are not disrupted.
I am motivated to contribute to disrupting these systems of oppression and domination within higher education and within Canadian society. I am engaged in disrupting my colonial mindset. I work to co-create reciprocal relationships with Indigenous colleagues, neighbours, and community members on a personal level and in institutional contexts. A practice of acknowledging land and place is one of the small steps I take in my commitment to moving towards reconciliation and justice.
Commitment to Action
As I reflect on my childhood ignorance about Indigenous people in contemporary Canada, and see how this ignorance has affected me in my present adult life, I understand that the public education system in Canada failed so many generations, including mine, by miseducating us about Indigenous people, about how this country called Canada was formed, and about what it means to be settlers living on Indigenous homelands. I feel a responsibility to correct this miseducation by unlearning my ignorance and addressing my vast knowledge gaps.
