by Azul Dugue
2024

Why:

“Land Acknowledgements” emerged in what is known as Canada today, and are a way to express responsibility to the past history, current reality and future commitment to Indigenous people’s struggles in their lands. 

Even though the European art scene openly engages in critical conversations around racism, hetero-patriarchy, ecological extractivism and capitalism, it somehow does a fantastic work at remaining silent on how it directly benefits from historic and ongoing global structures of colonial violence. 

Land acknowledgements are:

Honest recognition of global structures of violence: including the dispossession, genocide, ecocide, invisibilized underpaid labour, and environmental exploitation that (historically and ongoingly) enable the conditions for the current colonial systems to flourish. 

an acknowledgment of life and of self: of land as a living entity that belongs to itself. Of our bodies as land made of the same rivers, glaciers, toxins, soils, winds, plastics, and fires as the territories we are part of.

A spatio-temporal acceptance of complicity: a mature political questioning of how we benefit from intersecting crises.

A statement of commitment to un-learning our internalized harmful ways of being, thinking and feeling, and to supporting those who put their lives on the line to resist colonial violence. 

An important but insufficient step towards caring for intergenerational and global conflicts with humility, honesty and self-reflexivity. 

Land Acknowledgements are NOT: 

A tokenistic way to perform allyship, to gain social capital, or to state one’s benevolence or ‘woke-ness’. They are not a generic script that can be universally applied. 

Since Land Acknowledgements are deeply contextual, nuanced and personal, this is an incomplete list of questions that can serve as a starting point: 

1. What historical violences were necessary for [insert the nation-state where you are based] to be what it is today? Who are the humans and other species that have historically paid the price for this infrastructure I benefit from? Who will be the future ancestors that will bear the costs, unless things radically change? 

2. What are the neo-colonial global supply chains that provide my food, health care, road, clothes and shelter? What are the conditions that enable the mines that bleed the minerals in my computers and phones? Who’s lives are at risk because of my waste (i.e. the level of CO2 released into the atmosphere, or the plastic waste that sustains my lifestyle?). Who are the most affected communities by the climate and nature emergency? 

3. What are the paradigms that mask this violence as progress and development? 

4. How can I honor these hard truths from a place of accountability, honesty and care? How can I do so without centering myself through guilt? How can acknowledging that I am part of the problem contribute to a deeper relational accountability towards it? 

Note: Allow the process of creating a land acknowledgement to pierce and collectivize your heart. Make it personal and be specific. Look up the names of the corporations, products, foods, and people(s). Remember the specific moments, and date them if needed. Name your denials and realizations.