Abstract

Land acknowledgements have become almost ubiquitous in post-secondary education settings in Canada. However, the origins and widespread popularity of these practices has gone largely unexamined. In this article, the literature on land acknowledgement practices in Canada is reviewed, focusing in particular on the growing criticisms of these acknowledgements. While initially understood as culturally based political statements to resist the erasure of Indigenous presence and colonial violence, these practices have been repurposed in settler institutions. Land acknowledgements have now become deeply embedded in state-sponsored “forgive-and-forget” reconciliation efforts that seek to absorb Indigenous peoples into the body politic of “good Canadians”. This shift in acknowledgement practices has been increasingly criticized for devolving into box-ticking exercises, strictly symbolic gestures, moves to settler innocence, and attempts to rewrite Indigenous and settler colonial history. Analysing the literature using a lens of settler colonial theory, I argue that institutionalized land acknowledgements in Canada do not pertain to actual Indigenous peoples. These statements reference a mythical fabrication of Indigenousness that is consistent with settler dreams of benevolence, innocence, and the end of colonization in Canada. This co-optation of Indigeneity has important implications for recent efforts to “Indigenize the academy” through the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in curriculum. In response to this subversion of Indigenous knowledges, a stance of refusal on the part of Indigenous members of the academy can be a demonstration of agency in institutions in which we are relatively powerless.

摘要

在加拿大的专上教育环境中，土地确认几乎无处不在。然而，这些做法的起源和广泛流行在很大程度上未经审查。在本文中，回顾了有关加拿大土地承认实践的文献，特别关注对这些承认越来越多的批评。虽然最初被理解为以文化为基础的政治声明，以抵制土著存在和殖民暴力的消除，但这些做法已被重新用于定居者机构。土地承认现在已经深深植根于国家支持的“宽恕和忘记”和解努力中，这些努力旨在将原住民纳入“好加拿大人”的政治体系中。承认做法的这种转变越来越受到批评，因为它会演变成打勾练习、严格象征性的手势、向定居者纯真以及试图改写土著和定居者殖民历史的努力。使用定居者殖民理论的视角分析文献，我认为加拿大的制度化土地承认与实际的土著人民无关。这些陈述引用了对原住民的神话般的虚构，这与定居者对加拿大的仁慈、纯真和殖民终结的梦想是一致的。这种对原住民的吸收对最近通过将原住民知识纳入课程来“使学院本土化”的努力具有重要意义。为了回应这种对土著知识的颠覆，