Entry 12: Land Acknowledgement
Canoeing in northern Minnesota as part of Penn State’s cultural immersion course “Exploring Indigenous Ways of Knowing Among the Ojibwe” (Lucy Bryan, 2009).
Happy Indigenous People’s Day! In honor of this occasion (and in response to the fact that, in many places across the country, this day is still commemorates the “discovery of the New World” by a murderous colonizer), I thought I’d share a bit about the Land Acknowledgment chapter in my recently published book, In Between Places.
One of the authors who wrote a blurb for the back of my book had this to say after reading it:
I am very curious about how you came to write the Land Acknowledgment chapter. This topic is something that I and some of my closest writer friends talk about a lot, and at least one of my Native friends has very strong opinions about them. I was so struck by how you approached this topic… One of the criticisms of land acknowledgments is how shallow they are, how brief, without dealing with the deeper history and without taking meaningful action. But what you did was to take each and every place and give its people the depth and history that we should all know. It felt like you put an enormous amount of research into that. Some of that detailed history I knew, but not many white or settler-descended people do, and I only know it because I've read heavy and often tedious academic tomes on the subject, so I'm curious how you came to bring all that history together!
I’d like to share a lightly edited version of the response I wrote to her about the process of writing my Land Acknowledgement chapter:
I have mixed feelings about land acknowledgements. A lot of them seem performative and trendy, and because I wanted to avoid that ickiness, the manuscript I originally sent my publisher didn't include one. Then, last year, I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States, and it reminded me of something I'd learned way back in 2009, when I served as a teaching assistant for a cultural immersion course on several Ojibwe nations in northern Minnesota: Not only am I (and other non-Native Americans) incredibly ignorant about the history of indigenous peoples, but that ignorance perpetuates injustices and oppression of indigenous Americans (and indigenous peoples all over the world) today.
I feel compelled to work against the historical and cultural erasure that has happened for so long, even though I am wary of white saviorism and aware that good intentions don't always have positive effects. As the writer of a book that has so much to do with American landscapes and our relationships to place, I decided that I had an opportunity to not just acknowledge past and present but to educate myself and many of my readers about the history that both characterizes those individual places and links them together.
I honestly didn't know what form the acknowledgement would take when I began the process. I started by exploring what indigenous Americans had to say about land acknowledgements—what works and what doesn't. I found this resource from the Native Governance Center a helpful place to start, as well as this one from Native Land Digital in Canada. Still not knowing exactly what I would create—but knowing I wanted to name more than just an indigenous people for each territory—I decided to learn the history of each of the places in my book. Then I went down the rabbit hole of research. I'm lucky to work for an academic institution that gives me access to pretty much anything that lives in a library, but there was lots of info on the internet as well. I think my experience in Minnesota and reading Dunbar-Ortiz's book also gave me a sense of where to look and what was important.
As I researched, I drafted a brief narrative for each place. It was really interesting (and depressing) to see the ways history overlapped (and repeated itself) in these places. All told, it took about two weeks of intense research and writing for me to construct the land acknowledgement. While I was not initially expecting to write an entire chapter-length acknowledgement, that's ultimately what happened.
I still have worries about the acknowledgement as it is. One thing that concerns me is that I spend too much time in the past, and that might unintentionally reinforce the problematic belief that Native Americans are peoples of the past—tragically exterminated more than a century ago. I worry that the paragraphs acknowledging their present aren't enough. I also worry that by focusing on the injustices and horrors that befell the indigenous inhabitants of the places I write about, I am drawing attention away from the beauty, resilience, and creativity of Native folk, past and present. But ultimately, I had to recognize the limits of what a single chapter-length piece could do. I don't think it would have been possible to adequately trace all of the descendants of the peoples I wrote about and to describe who and where they are now. In the end, I opted to relate history (in a similar style to Dunbar-Ortiz) and to do the best I could with the information I was able to access.
On this day, if you haven’t already, spend some time learning about the history of the land you live on and the people(s) who call it their ancestral home. For those who are interested, you can click here to read my entire Land Acknowledgement chapter. (Also, I’ll confess that there is an unfortunate typo in this chapter—an 1890 that should be 1790. I’m working to get that fixed in future printings.)
