A short YouTube video by Sandi L Boucher (Red Thunderbolt, Anishinaabe) discussing the purpose and proper intent behind land acknowledgments. Boucher argues that land acknowledgments are meaningful only when part of broader Indigenous engagement and reconciliation work, warns against performative/canned statements, and urges entities to acknowledge that Indigenous peoples and their lands remain present. The clip previews follow-up videos on what not to include and what to do.
Chapters
So we got to talk about land acknowledgments. Because the reality is, as an Anishinaabequia, as an Indigenous woman, as an Indigenous person, I can't help but notice there's a whole lot of crappy land acknowledgments out there. But together we can fix. Hello, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River first nation in Treaty 3 territory in Northern Ontario and Holy Moly's, we need to speak about land acknowledgments. Now. It is probably the most random email I get. If someone's just going to email me out of the blue about something and they're not responding to one of my emails, it is always or a lot of the time, it's going to be, I want to write a land acknowledgement for whatever group or industry or entity they belong to. And can you help with that? My first question before I say yes or no is always, why do you want to do a land acknowledgement? Because, truth be told, if their answer is, well, everyone else is doing one. So I thought we should. That by definition, makes the land acknowledgement performative. You're just performing. It has no depth, it has no authenticity. And if that's the answer I receive, I know what my answer is. I'm not wasting my time and effort helping them write one. Indigenous people do not need to hear any more empty words. I'll explain that in a second. But if, when they tell me why they're creating a land acknowledgement or why they want to, if they say that it's part of an Indigenous engagement strategy that they're developing and they're looking at a bunch of different things, and this is one of the things they wanted to do. Well, now, now, okay, now you're on the right page. Now we can work together. And here's why that's important. I believe reconciliation is going to be a million conversations, a million little actions, a million questions, a million answers, and a whole bunch of apologies as people come to realize the missing pieces that they have, missing pieces of information they weren't aware of up till now. I think land acknowledgments done well go hand in hand with the official apology. What I mean by that is the official apology acknowledged the wrongs that were done. There were some promises made, and those definitely didn't follow through. But that's another video. It acknowledged publicly for the first time the residential school. What we as Indigenous people had always known was finally being acknowledged publicly. Another thing that had not been acknowledged publicly was that the land now known as Canada was actually indigenous land, was and remains Indigenous land, the traditional territories. And as you so often hear of whatever nation's area you happen to be in. So to me, Indigenous people were made invisible. They were pushed aside, marginalized, taken out of the mainstream conversation. And the land acknowledgement is a step towards acknowledging that truth, like the official apologies acknowledge the truth of the residential schools. So when you're doing a land acknowledgement, as far as I'm concerned, the why. Why these are important is your entity, business, corporation, nonprofit, whatever, is acknowledging that you're on Indigenous land and you're naming those indigenous nations, and hopefully you're acknowledging we're still here. So that's the why. It's an important part of reconciliation, if done properly. But if it's done, you know, half, or it's done with little thought, or you just copy someone else's, or worse, you're just doing that memorized little two sentences that I've actually heard even children recite. Don't. Because as Anishinaabe Kwei, in my humble opinion, if you can't do an authentic land acknowledgment, then don't do one at all, because a fake one that took you a half second to create is insulting. We can tell how much effort you put into it. We can tell how authentic it is. Just like when you walk into a store and meet someone you haven't seen in a while, you can tell when they're being authentic or not. We've got that power, too. So that's the why. It's part of the reconciliation work, but only if you're taking the time to acknowledge you're on indigenous lands, not just traditional lands, lands that still exists. We are still here. Tomorrow we're going to talk about the things that shouldn't be in your land acknowledgement, what you shouldn't do. And on Friday, we'll talk about what you should do. Stay tuned. I love you. Take care. Bye bye.
