We encourage all presenters to provide a land/water acknowledgement before their session. We’ve worked with the American Indian Caucus to gather these resources for creating your own land acknowledgement as well as making tangible contributions to Indigenous nations and supporting organizations. Tribal nations people have always practiced land acknowledgements when visiting territories that were not their own. Acknowledgements are opportunities for learning history, relationship building, situating oneself in a larger web of relations, and holding oneself accountable to being a good guest. Before giving a land acknowledgement, we ask you to do the following:
- Practice self-reflection.
- Why are you giving this acknowledgement?
- How do you hope to support tribal nations people?
- How can your scholarship and teaching make visible indigenous intellectuals and grassroots movements?
- Do your homework: take some time to learn about the tribal nations people of the space you currently occupy–past, present, and their future goals.
- Practice the pronunciation of the language and tribes.
- Be honest about the actions of colonizers. Yet, land acknowledgements are not grim. It should celebrate the resiliency of tribal nations people and the gifts provided by the land.
Yet, giving a land acknowledgement is not enough. We do not want to tokenize or fetishize indigenous people or this land. We ask you to also do the following:
We ask you to build real and authentic relationships with tribal nations people through the following: cite indigenous intellectuals in your research, teach indigenous intellectuals, attend sessions by indigenous scholars, and support grassroots movements in your own community.
If you are interested in learning more, please consider attending the American Indian Caucus’s workshop, “Making Indigenous Space in Higher Education,” Wednesday, March 9, 6:30–8:30 p.m. ET during the 2022 CCCC Annual Convention.
If you are interested in connecting with the American Indian Caucus, please visit: https://ncte.org/groups/caucuses/american-indian-caucus/.
Research Resources
- Academic Land Acknowledgment for Settler Scholars: A Guest Post by Dr. Eugenia Zuroski
- The Decolonial Atlas
- “American Indian and Indigenous Rhetorics: A Digital Annotated Bibliography,” The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics
- “Land-Grab Universities,” High Country News
Organizations Supporting Indigenous Nations
- American Indian College Fund
- Chi-Nations Youth Council
- First Nations Development Institute
- Onaman Collective
Land Acknowledgement from the 2022 CCCC Program Chair Staci Perryman-Clark
We would like to recognize Western Michigan University is located on lands historically occupied by Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadmi nations. Please take a moment to acknowledge and honor this ancestral land of the Three Fires Confederacy, the sacred lands of all indigenous peoples and their continued presence.
