Statewide Land Acknowledgement Statement
Maryland State Arts Council
Read the Maryland State Arts Council’s “Statewide Land Acknowledgement Statement.” This statement is based on one drafted by an elder of the Choptico Band of Indians, Piscataway-Conoy Tribe for the MSAC Land Acknowledgement Project. Listen to an audio pronunciation guide.
For additional land acknowledgement resources from the Maryland State Arts Council, visit https://msac.org/resources/land-acknowledgements and the MSAC Land Acknowledgement Project Overview and Resource Guide.
Additional Resources
As rhetoricians, it is our responsibility to understand the history of the places where we live, teach, and gather. It is our responsibility to understand how the history of these places shapes the knowledge making, storytelling, teaching, and learning of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit peoples. As scholars and as teachers, we have a responsibility to learn and to speak the truth about the historical legacies of settler-colonial language and literary education in residential and settler school systems as well as about contemporary settler colonialism within our profession.
It is the responsibility of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to make actionable its commitments to healing relations and creating from this healing equal and reciprocal partnerships and alliances with Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit members of our profession.
To begin meeting this responsibility, CCCC affirms its commitment to
- Advancing citation justice broadly and, in particular, advocating for reading, teaching, and citing the work of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit scholars, writers, knowledge creators, and storytellers. We call on our membership to also make and act upon this commitment.
- Ensuring that the organizers of each Annual Convention focus on connecting Convention attendees with Indigenous communities on whose territories we gather to teach and learn with and for all our relations.
- Encouraging panelists at our gatherings, regardless of the subject of their presentations, to reflect on whether or how their work meets the needs and interests of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit students; acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous, Métis and Innuit scholars; and addresses an audience that includes Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit peoples.
Four books you should read that were written by CCCC American Indian Caucus members
Anderson, Joyce Rain, Rose Gubele, and Lisa King. Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2015.
King, Lisa. Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums. Oregon State UP, 2017.
Mukavetz, Andrea Riley, with Frances Geri Roossien. You Better Go See Geri: An Odawa Woman’s Life of Recovery and Resilience. Oregon State UP, 2021.
Wieser, Kimberly G. Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies. U of Oklahoma P, reprint edition, 2017.
To learn even more, check out this annotated bibliography of scholarship on American Indian and Indigenous rhetorics, with a special focus on those works produced by NCTE/CCCC Caucus members: https://kimberlywieser.oucreate.com/americanindianandindigenousrhetbib/
Four books you should read about settler colonialism, academia, and anticolonial research, teaching, and writing
Garcia, Jeremy, Valerie Shirley, and Hollie Anderson Kulago. Indigenizing Education: Transformative Research, Theories, and Praxis. Information Age Publishing, 2022.
Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books Ltd. and U of Otago P, 1999.
Wilson Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing, 2008.
Younging, Gary. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. Brush Education, Inc., 2018.
