YouTube video by Sandi L Boucher advising on making authentic land acknowledgements. She emphasizes avoiding historicizing Indigenous peoples, explicitly acknowledging that non-Indigenous people benefit from being on Indigenous land, and avoiding robotic, insincere recitations—encouraging authentic, present-day statements and personal willingness to make amends.
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And here we are one more time talking about land acknowledgments. On Wednesday, we talked about why land acknowledgments are important. Yesterday we talked about the one key thing that makes a land acknowledgement worth your time and energy. What we want to hear as Anishinaabe people, as Indigenous peoples. And today I got three things that you definitely shouldn't be doing. Okay, so the first one, don't historicize us. Canadian history has a nasty habit. And ask people. I'm 59 years old. Ask people around my age. When we learned about indigenous people in history class, we lived in tepees or out on the prairies or in the long houses a long time ago and there was never any mention of what happened to us or are we still here? That's historicizing us, making us part of history and then just eliminating us from the conversation. So make sure your land acknowledgement, if you want to speak of traditional territories, yes, there are traditional territories. There actually are present day territories as well. So make sure to mention or acknowledge that, that we're still here. Two, and this one is so incredibly important in my main, my mind. And Isaac Murdoch is the one that brought it to my attention with a post he did on social media. You have to acknowledge that you benefit from being here as a non indigenous person, that you have a career or a family or a home or whatever the case may be, that you benefit from being on indigenous land. Lands that would be truth. Again, truth before reconciliation. So don't skip over that. Make sure you do that. So your land acknowledgment, you shouldn't historicize us. And you shouldn't forget to mention that you benefit from being here. But last but not least, something I hinted to yesterday, no robotics, no. No robots reading a well defined state statement because they're terrified they're going to say something. You know what, making amends, apologizing, acknowledging wrongdoing is not comfortable it, but it's important and it's important that it's done authentically. So no, can we all just after this video, turn off your computer, walk over to that piece of paper, wherever you got your land acknowledgment written on and rip it up so that you don't have that robotic statement anymore. So there's the three don'ts. Don't historicize us. Don't forget to mention that you benefit here and benefit from being here, I should say. And no robots. What do you want to say? Be authentic about it. Do not worry about tripping over words because if you're worrying about that, you're thinking about you and not your audience. What would you like to say to indigenous people? Because if you want to be part of reconciliation, if you want to be considered an ally, then you should have an answer to that. You should be willing to deliver it. I hope that makes sense. If you have questions, I always just an email away or comment on this video. I will see it and I will definitely answer any questions or comment back. Until next week. A whole different ball game next week for the members in my membership. Those blog posts are already in the membership, so you know what I'm talking about. Shh. Don't tell anyone. For them, it's a surprise. Enjoy your weekend. Take care. I love you. Bye. Bye.
