A Call to Action-Oriented Land Acknowledgments in CBGL

Image quotes authors, “since the creation of the land acknowledgement, we’ve come to understand that while this action was well-intended, it was also ill-advised.”

Mathew H. Gendle and Amanda Tapler, Elon University, Elon NC, USA

Over the past decade, the creation and use of land acknowledgements has become more common within academic and social justice spaces. Although these acknowledgments are developed with good intentions, and frequently recognize colonialist histories, they also face considerable criticism for often being superficial, performative, and lacking a meaningful call to action for the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty (for example, see ‘Land Acknowledgments’ Are Just Moral Exhibitionism and Rethinking Land Acknowledgments).

As a Community-Based Global Learning (CBGL) program that is strongly committed to advancing equity and social, political, and environmental justice, we created a land acknowledgment for our program in 2019. This was one way we hoped to demonstrate allyship with our local Indigenous communities. Over the years since the creation of the land acknowledgement, we’ve come to understand that while this action was well-intended, it was also ill-advised. In this post, we’d like to briefly share some of our program’s experience with land acknowledgments, as well as how our thinking has evolved on this issue, in the hopes that other CBGL programs may benefit from our experience.

Several years ago, our institution made some initial steps to engage with local Indigenous communities to co-create an action-oriented land acknowledgment for the University. At the time, it was thought that an institution-wide acknowledgment would be forthcoming in the very near future, and that it would be one that all programs on campus would use. For a variety of reasons, progress on this institutional acknowledgment came to, and presently remains at, a standstill.  As a result, individual departments and programs, including ours, began creating and using their own land acknowledgments without any institutional coordination. These acknowledgments often focus solely on the past, and do not offer measurable action steps to promote reconciliation and justice. Although there was a broad understanding that these statements had been constructed without engaging local Indigenous communities as partners and co-creators, it was thought that these acknowledgements were still serving as important recognitions of the ongoing traumas enacted against Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, many of us believed that our work on these would also function as a bridge to the development of a robust, action-oriented, and institutional implementation of a co-created land acknowledgement in the near future.  

Over the past two years, as we have continued to read more about best-practices for, and criticisms of, land acknowledgements, we became increasingly uncomfortable with what we created and had been publicly sharing. Additionally, continued engagement with a variety of Indigenous voices, lived experiences, and perspectives has led us to realize that the statement we had created and were using needed to be radically revised. While we intended to promote reconciliation and advance equity and justice, for some in our communities, our statements did the opposite, and further perpetuated colonialist mindsets and Indigenous trauma. In January 2022, with the help of colleagues with expertise in Indigenous rights and local Indigenous peoples, we completely re-envisioned what had been our program’s land acknowledgment into a statement in support of Indigenous sovereignty and rights (available here: https://www.elon.edu/u/academics/project-pericles/statement-in-support-of-indigenous-sovereignty-and-rights/ and in full-text below). We believe that this new statement allows us to better serve as meaningful allies with Indigenous communities. Unlike our previous acknowledgment, this new statement offers a specific call to action to our institution and outlines discreet action steps for which the University can be held publicly accountable.

We strongly believe that any action toward restoring Indigenous sovereignty must come from the most senior levels of the institution’s administration and Board of Trustees as these are the people that ultimately hold power over the university’s resources. Statements from individual programs will always be performative, as there is little that individual academic units can do to enact the coordinated and structural change that is necessary to promote justice and equity in relation to settler colonialism. Many individual faculty, staff, and programs on campus, as well as Indigenous community members, have voiced their support for our on-going work that has resulted in the program’s new statement in support of Indigenous sovereignty and rights. With that being said, it has also been made clear that, as a monolithic entity, our institution is not yet ready to think seriously about what authentic restoration (including sustained compensation and the return of land) really entails. Over the past several months, we have been surprised by the pushback we received from the institution, including an administrative request (which we declined) for us to remove the statement from our program’s website.

            From our personal experience, as well as from engaging with the writing and thinking of many others, we’ve identified a few key practices that should be employed by any individual or program that has created (or is thinking about creating) a land acknowledgment or similar statement:

1)    Create land acknowledgements that include specific action steps that holds the person(s), organization, or institution offering the acknowledgement publicly accountable. Don’t generate a land acknowledgement if it is simply performative.

2)    Construct acknowledgements with significant engagement and input from local Indigenous communities. Practicing cultural humility (especially on the part of the colonizers) should be of utmost importance when developing partnerships in order to best understand, adhere to, and address Indigenous protocols, conventions, and traditions. There is a delicate balance to be struck here, as Indigenous communities must not be burdened with the responsibility of educating colonizers. It is essential that Indigenous peoples have a leadership role in the co-creation of plans for restoration. Building authentic and mutually beneficial relationships wherein colonizers work in humble ways to support the stated needs and goals of Indigenous communities should be a priority. When collaborating with Indigenous communities, they must be fully and appropriately compensated, under their own terms, for their intellectual and emotional labor.

3)    Acknowledgements should provide specific context about what the statement is, the reasons for its existence, who it is speaking to, and what outcomes are intended to come from sharing it, prior to being released publicly, whether in print or via verbal communication.

4)    Focus your words, thoughts, and language with the understanding and recognition that Indigenous peoples are a part of our community. Settler colonialism continues to be active and ongoing. Intergenerational trauma resulting from genocide and forced displacement persists. These issues are contemporary ones, and are not relics confined to history books. We need to acknowledge Indigenous lived experiences and elevate their voices.

5)    Ensure you have a flexible, amendable, living document. Be open to feedback (no matter how critical), graciously accept it, and use it to make further improvements. Recognize that the work of reconciliation and restoration will be an on-going process, one that will never be complete. Approach this process with humility, engage in continuous critical examination of you and your organization’s positionality, and work to address and level power imbalances.

6)    Know that these land acknowledgements or statements are potentially going to make some colleagues, administrators, and members of Boards of Trustees very uncomfortable. If done properly, such statements will compel people to seriously confront the realities of ongoing settler colonialism and challenge them to grapple with meaningful and measurable outcomes, such as the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty.

Dr. Mathew H. Gendle is the Director of Project Pericles and is a Professor of Psychology at Elon University in Elon, NC, USA.

Prof. Amanda Tapler is the Associate Director of Project Pericles and is a Senior Lecturer of Public Health Studies at Elon University in Elon, NC, USA.

Statement in Support of Indigenous Sovereignty and Rights

Note: The following statement is offered as an alternative to a land acknowledgment. The Project Pericles program at Elon University asserts that land acknowledgments, by themselves, are insufficient instruments to honor and recognize Indigenous sovereignty. Additionally, land acknowledgments do not typically provide a defined plan that outlines a substantial institutional commitment to meaningful restoration.

The Project Pericles program at Elon University recognizes the importance of critically examining our collective history and how the institution came to occupy the land where Elon’s campus is presently situated. This exercise is vital for understanding our current reality and also functions as an initial step in the process of healing the deep wounds of our shared history. This includes, but is not limited to, the dispossession and theft of land from Indigenous peoples by white colonists, the trauma resulting from the genocide and violent displacement of Indigenous communities, as well as over 400 years of the enslavement, torture, and systematic mistreatment of Indigenous and African peoples and their descendants.

However, this recognition of past injustices is not enough. Therefore, the Project Pericles program calls upon Elon University to open and sustain a dialogue with local Indigenous peoples, most notably the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, and to commit to the long-term pursuit of equity. This process must follow Indigenous protocols and result in more than a statement acknowledging who first owned the land currently occupied by Elon University. The University as a whole (and not just individual units) must find a way to recognize and honor Indigenous sovereignty, and local Indigenous communities must have the agency to determine effective restoration strategies that will provide sustained compensation for Elon’s ongoing participation in settler colonialism. It is imperative that the University:

• Consider, in good faith, the recommendations of any Elon working group that may be tasked with initiating and sustaining this ongoing dialogue.

• Create, and be held publicly accountable for, an outward-facing plan containing specific actionable items that begin to address Elon’s role in perpetuating systemic injustice.

• Identify, steward, and commit substantial financial and non-financial resources to this reconciliation effort.

The Project Pericles Program at Elon University deeply values our organizational partnership with members of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota. We recognize that the work of reconciliation and restoration is ever-evolving and will never be complete. As an academic unit, we approach this process with humility, an ongoing critical examination of our own positionality, and an understanding that we will continue to learn how to be more effective allies and partners with Indigenous peoples. We will revisit and revise this statement over time as the nature of the relationship between the University and local Indigenous communities continues to evolve.

Editor’s Note: Consider examining the Global Solidarity, Local Actions Toolkit for a set of introductory resources supporting learning and action on decolonization.