My research into territorial acknowledgments continues with “The limits of Settlers’ Territorial Acknowledgments,” a short essay by Lila Asher, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis—another in the list Matthew Anderson gave me. In this article, Asher, Curnow, and Davis trace the development of territorial acknowledgements made at meetings of Fossil Free UofT, an environmentalist group at the University of Toronto. The purpose of this case study, they write, is to trace “how student activists engaged with the practice to see what pedagogical outcomes the territorial acknowledgments generated” (316). They want to ask whether such acknowledgements are “a tool for decolonial solidarity,” or whether they are “the kind of move to innocence that Indigenous scholars and activists have warned against” (316). What “pedagogical work” do such acknowledgments “accomplish in settler spaces”? (317). Their conclusion is that “while the territorial acknowledgments successfully worked against the daily erasure of Indigenous people on Turtle Island and unsettled settler participants in the group, they failed as a decolonial pedagogy” because they “often served as a move to innocence, via containment and using decolonization as a metaphor, and did not lead to relationships of solidarity or decolonial action such as the rematriation of Indigenous land, language, and lifeways” (317). Territorial acknowledgments, the authors contend, are at best “a tiny part of decolonial solidarity pedagogy, and must be part of a broader decolonial praxis” (317).

According to Asher, Curnow, and Davis, territorial acknowledgments have arisen within a broader political moment defined by “Indigenous resurgence movements” like Idle No More and the Standing Rock protests, which have “gained traction and visibility internationally” (317). Such movements, they note have been accompanied by “a wealth of Indigenous scholarship laying out a vision for decolonial processes” (317). That scholarship asserts that “paths to decolonization . . . do not lie in getting colonial institutions to recognize Indigenous rights”—and here they cite the work of Jeff Corntassel and Glen Coulthard—“but in reclaiming land, traditional governance, language, cultural practices, and autonomy” (317). The authors suggest that another part of the context of territorial acknowledgments in Canada is the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which called upon settler institutions “to reflect on their colonial foundations” (317). “Within this context, territorial acknowledgments have become one of the practices that have scaled, becoming common in educational institutions and public events,” they write, “as a way of demonstrating support for reconciliation or as expressions of anticolonial solidarity,” while at the same time “they have also been critiqued by Indigenous people for the ways they have been institutionalized” (317). For instance, the blogger Onkwehonwe Rising argues that territorial acknowledgments are an appropriation of Indigenous diplomatic practices of recognizing kinship and alliance; those practices are then applied by settlers in a very different context of recognizing whose stolen land they occupy (317). “By taking what has been, in some nations, a diplomatic protocol, gutting it of its ontological and relational context, and repurposing it to legitimate settlers’ continued presence on stolen land, we effectively colonize territorial acknowledgments,” Asher, Curnow, and Davis write (318).

For that reason, the authors ask what people learn from territorial acknowledgments and whether they serve any decolonial purpose. They suggest that such acknowledgments “are often practiced because of a vague interest in supporting Indigenous groups, or even pressure to be politically correct” (318). Settlers who read such acknowledgments at public events often “have little understanding of the details of local Indigenous history or of the development of the territorial acknowledgment practice,” and as a result, the practice ends up being reduced “to a mundane ‘box-ticking’ exercise, easily ignored and void of learning opportunities” (318). I hear echoes of Chelsea Vowel’s argument in that sentence, and indeed the authors cite her blog post.

However, despite these critiques, territorial acknowledgments continue to be practiced by settler-descendants. The rationales for this practice “are often rooted in ideas of teaching and learning” (318). It is suggested that they unsettle ideas of terra nullius—“the myth that settlers found empty land available to them, rather than a richly populated continent with diverse, vibrant, place-based cultures”—and thereby “combat erasure and force settlers to grapple with our positionality” (318). “Activists assume territorial acknowledgments to be educative, a tool through which settlers become aware of Indigenous claims to land and begin to engage in solidarity practices,” the authors suggest, and for that reason, territorial acknowledgments are “fundamentally pedagogical interventions” (318). They draw upon a definition of pedagogy “as necessarily relational, intentional, and ethical” formulated by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Alexandra Arráiz Matute to argue that the territorial acknowledgments they have studied—the ones offered at Fossil Free UofT meetings—are intended “to interrupt the ubiquity of settler coloniality,” to “‘push against’ dominant ideas of settler colonialism which secure settler futurities” (318). Such acknowledgments are therefore intended “as a decolonial solidarity pedagogy which would raise awareness among participants and foment different relationships to knowledge, land, and Indigenous peoples” (318-19). 

However, because territorial acknowledgments in such spaces often “lack the relationality, intentionality, and ethic that underpins the pedagogical relationship,” their ability “to serve decolonial solidarity visions is, at best, uneven” (319). That’s because solidarity, according to Gaztambide-Fernández, “entails combining concrete actions, embedded in specific and local relationships of accountability, with critical reflection,” and because it also “requires an ontological shift, a move towards a way of being founded on interdependency” (319). Such an ontological shift “draws on Indigenous conceptions of relationality” and decenters “Eurowestern ontologies” (319). “Therefore,” the authors contend, “a decolonial solidarity praxis requires the development of both relationships of accountability and an understanding of relationality” (319).

According to Asher, Curnow, and Davis, it’s difficult to initiate decolonial processes because “settlers are often hesitant to acknowledge our own complicity in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples” and therefore often fall back on narratives “that erase Indigenous presence” or use “a variety of ‘moves to innocence’ to try to claim legitimacy for our occupation and achieve absolution” (319). From the literature on territorial acknowledgments, it’s not clear whether they “are productive in disrupting these avoidance mechanisms and pushing settlers towards decolonial solidarity,” although such acknowledgments have not been systematically examined (319). That lack of systematic examination is the absence this article sets out to address.

The research this paper addresses was a participatory action research project, designed in partnership with members of Fossil Free UofT and conducted over several years. That partnership, the authors write, “is important because the questions and results are constantly made accountable to the movement as we ensure relational accountability and reliability through our experiences and our networks” (319-20). I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it suggests that their research design set out to incorporate Indigenous concepts of relationality, derived from scholars such as Shawn Wilson, whose work they cite here. “Our positionality as participants in the group and also as researchers meant that we were not only deeply embedded in the practices of Fossil Free UofT, bringing an insider perspective, but also meant that your research process was actively part of the group and its political struggles,” they state (320). Indeed, the various members of the research team “initiated the longer territorial acknowledgments” and one was chair of “the equity committee that drove them” (320). Thus, while the article may seem critical of the practice of territorial acknowledgments, it is “a reflection on our own attempted interventions as we strive to do solidarity more substantively and to shift the group toward land rematriation and climate justice” (320). Its criticism, then, is self-criticism.

The authors determined, by reviewing their video of Fossil Free UofT meetings, that there were three phases of acknowledgments: none at all (in the fall of 2014), scripted acknowledgments of 20 seconds or less (in the spring of 2015), and “longer pedagogical interventions” that ranged between two and 17 minutes in length (in the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016). Their intention in this article is to “trace the development of the group’s territorial acknowledgments, examining what they accomplished and where they fell short of the group’s aspirations” (321). 

The authors also note that “settler” is a rather blunt term, and that scholarship on the term suggests that it erases the differences between recent arrivals to Canada and those who were born here, but they also note the importance of Patrick Wolfe’s argument against “moves to avoid the settler-native binary” because “all non-Indigenous peoples are implicated in settler colonialism” through their presence on Indigenous lands (321). Their use of the term “settler” is thus aware of “the processes of racialization and historical specificities that complicate settler positionality, and thus the complicated ways in which each of us perform territorial acknowledgments” (321).

Despite such terminological complexities, the authors found that “settlers of colour and White settlers of all genders struggled with how to participate in decolonial solidarity” (321). “We saw people learning, developing new identities, epistemologies, concepts, and practices,” they write,” but instead of focusing on those individual learning processes, they want to ask “whether the developing territorial acknowledgments practiced within Fossil Free UofT had any pedagogical impact for the group as a whole” (321). Their conclusion is that while such acknowledgments “challenged the erasure of Indigenous peoples and were unsettling for settlers, they ultimately fell short of decolonial pedagogy” (321).

Their first point is that territorial acknowledgments “successfully interrupted, to some extent, the everyday erasure of Indigenous peoples in Fossil Free UofT” (321). They cite Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s argument that not recognizing territory is a political choice, and the argument of Eve Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández that erasing Indigenous peoples is a “key component of settler colonialism, allowing settlers to take their place and take their land” (322). Such an erasure is normalized by school curriculum, which excludes Indigenous people and Indigenous thought (322). “In this context, the awareness fostered by Fossil Free UofT’s territorial acknowledgment practice” can be seen as an accomplishment, “even if the effects of the practice remain in question” (322). However, even as they combatted the erasure of Indigenous peoples, the group’s territorial acknowledgments “became normalized and rote” (322). As a result, members of the group advocated for acknowledgments that were more engaged and that would “invoke more substantial learning opportunities” (322), and “the expectations for territorial acknowledgments changed from reading the short script to adding on a different educational component” (323). Even the group members who were reluctant “to engage with solidarity practices” were clearly prompted to think about such practices through the territorial acknowledgments (323). During the two years of engaging in territorial acknowledgments, “the group moved from rarely talking about colonialism to developing nuanced arguments on either side of the question of solidarity work that consistently engaged with content relevant to Indigenous peoples” (324).

Second, the settlers in the group became “unsettled” (324). The authors cite Emma Battel-Lowman and Adam Barker’s suggestion that “decolonial solidarity is an uncomfortable process” for settlers, because it forces us to “come to recognize the histories and contemporary power relations that structure our lives” (324). The acknowledgments “made settler speakers uncomfortable,” they write, and that discomfort could be seen in the “awkwardness in the conversations,” in the “bids to avoid the implications of settler colonialism,” and in the “shame and embarrassment about mispronunciation” of the names of Indigenous peoples and about “a lack of familiarity with Indigenous issues” (324). The authors noted that this discomfort was also expressed through two different types of avoidance behaviours: “awkward silence, where it seemed that people did not know what to say in response to the content; and derailment, where speakers brought up non-relevant content as a way of shifting the discussion away from its focus on settler colonialism” (325). Awkward silence were “the most common response to the invitation to participate in the territorial acknowledgment discussion,” and few group members engaged in the acknowledgments, leaving the same group of people to fill the silences (325-26). “While these avoidance mechanisms detracted from the pedagogical potential of the territorial acknowledgment, we argue that they show territorial acknowledgments do accomplish one of their goals, which is to make settlers uncomfortable about their position on the land and denaturalize settler claims to space,” the authors continue. “We argue discomfort has educative value in that it made people aware, on a regular basis, of their precarious claim to space on Turtle Island, as well as their awareness of their ignorance about Indigenous people and settler colonial histories” (326). They suggest, citing Chelsea Vowel, that such discomfort “is what is productive about territorial acknowledgments, and that discomfort is what makes people recognize their positionality and precarity” (326). That discomfort inspired some members of the group to learn more about Indigenous issues—by practicing how to pronounce correctly the names of the Indigenous nations included in the acknowledgments, for instance—although other group members clearly did not engage in such learning and tended to avoid the feelings of discomfort “rather than embrace responsibility” (326).

While the acknowledgments may have been pedagogically productive, Asher, Curnow, and Davis continue, “they continues to be problematic because they departed from anything like a territorial acknowledgment rooted in Indigenous protocols” (326). In other words, the group’s acknowledgments were extracted from their “relational context and origin as diplomatic protocol” and turned into broader discussions of colonialism and social justice, a shift which “recentered Eurowestern ways of knowing and being, drawing on frameworks such as critical social analysis and informational presentations that are familiar to settler university students, rather than remaining grounded in relationality” (326-27). The author’s cite Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s argument about decolonization becoming a metaphor or synonym for social justice, and suggest that instead of “forcing us to grapple with our positionality and responsibility in land rematriation, we often were dealing with questions of Indigenous struggles in the abstract, or with other social justice issues entirely” (327). The territorial acknowledgements the group practiced “were a hybrid, or perhaps a completely appropriated practice where our worldviews dominated,” and they “reinscribed Eurowestern ways of being based on knowledge sharing, rather than staying true to Indigenous conceptions of relationality, land, and nation, even when they did teach about Indigenous struggles and solidarity” (327). “Though we were recognizing Indigenous territory,” the authors continue, “we never implicated ourselves, as settlers and guests, within the relations of settler colonialism, or engaged with our different responsibilities” (327). They criticize the use of the term “descendant of settlers,” for instance, which was used by one member of the group, because it relegates “settler colonial violence to the past” and attempts “to escape personal implication” (327). They also criticize the conflation of the terms “settler” and “non-Indigenous,” which turn the term “settler” into “an empty signifier” (327). 

In addition, the authors criticize the group’s “inattention to how processes of racialization shifted individual members’ relationships to the territorial acknowledgments, the land, and the peoples we were recognizing,” an inattention that “demonstrates a significant gap in our decolonial pedagogies” (327). For instance, statements like “we’re all treaty people,” they argue, gloss over the way that people of colour are “differently positioned” in such relationships (328). As the territorial acknowledgments that developed “took the shape of decolonization as a metaphor,” they “became bids to include broad social justice content without effectively moving us toward decolonial frameworks that reckoned with the disparate positionalities within the group, and without attending to the ways that the social justice content people brought in around racialization, capitalism, and gender were imbricated with settler colonialism” (328).

According to Asher, Curnow, and Davis, “[d]espite the learning that territorial acknowledgments generated within the group by combatting erasure and unsettling settlers, settler discomfort quickly capped the potential of the practice to aid in decolonial work,” and the acknowledgments “became a way of insulating individual participants and the group as a whole from having to deal with our complicity in the colonial systems that we had begun to understand” (328). In other words, the acknowledgments became moves to innocence that made the settlers in the group feel comfortable (328). Those acknowledgments “were easily completed and contained in a way which marked us as good and enabled us to move on with the meeting without disruption” (328). “Moves to contain territorial acknowledgments and Indigenous content to a narrow portion of the agenda kept these topics from having a larger impact on our work, instead allowing many of us to feel as though we had done enough for the day,” they continue (328). Thus the acknowledgments became “a box-ticking exercise—a way to get the task of being a good ally over with” (329). Thus, as moves to innocence, the acknowledgments “undermined the decolonial pedagogical possibilities of territorial acknowledgments within Fossil Free UofT” (329). 

“Our work never engaged difficult conversations about what it might mean for the fossil fuel divestment campaign and each of us to wrestle with the colonial present,” the authors state (329). Nor did the acknowledgments address “contemporary land restitution”: “Our discussions remained abstracted from work on sovereignty, language, and land, instead discussing topical, but random content, like the work of Indigenous graffiti artists, without informing our work or being anchored in substantive decolonial solidarity praxis” (329). The acknowledgements tended to be performative, in other words, and they tended to assume that knowing about settler colonialism marked those present in the room “as good and responsible”—as distinct from others who were neither, it seems (329). “The ways that territorial acknowledgments were contained to small and discrete interventions also demonstrates the moves to innocence, and the check-boxes that Indigenous intellectuals warned against,” the authors continue (329).  Instead, the acknowledgments “were contained and were understood as extra; they were not considered part of the real work, rather, they were a statement to get through and move on from” (330).

In their conclusion, Asher, Curnow, and Davis argue that “[n]o matter how detailed and considerate a territorial acknowledgment spoken in a settler space is, it can never be more than a move to innocence if it is not combined with concrete actions embedded in relationships of solidarity” that “prefigure a cooperative, anti-oppressive dynamic between settlers and Indigenous people” (330). “Settlers must come to understand a worldview based on interdependency and relationality rather than exploitation and dispossession, and must actively support Indigenous people in their goals of reclaiming land and autonomy,” they write, and territorial acknowledgments fall short of those desired outcomes. The group’s discussions, they continue, “never gave us the tools for deeper engagement with questions of land restitution, sovereignty, or relational accountability, and instead served as a settler project embedded within the politics of distraction” (330). Therefore, territorial acknowledgments “were not an adequate substitute for solidarity praxis,” and they “may have even prevented us from pursuing more meaningful work” (330). “Rather than point us toward decolonial solidarity pedagogies and strategies for the environmental movement, we believe this analysis of territorial acknowledgments reveals the broader challenges of mobilizing reconciliation frameworks in the absence of meaningful recognition of sovereignty and land restitution,” they state (330). Indeed, the authors’ faith in the pedagogical potential of territorial acknowledgments “made them serve as moves to innocence” (331).

“We’re aware that this paper could be read as our own move to innocence, where we gain ‘professional kudos’ for our reflexivity,” Asher, Curnow, and Davis continue (331). Nevertheless, they state, the paper “is not an exercise for us in self-righteous judgment of our colleagues” (331). Instead, it is an attempt at exploring the limitations of territorial acknowledgments. “As people who were unsatisfied with the mainstream environmentalist approach and attempting to be accountable to Indigenous activists’ requests that we do territorial acknowledgments, our practice evolved as a way of mobilizing the relationality, the intentions, and the ethics that are fundamental to solidarity—and yet we were ineffective at accomplishing our goals,” they write. “Through this analysis we have shown that the territorial acknowledgments did not enable us to do deeper work, and often served as a substitute for real engagement. For us, this signals that we need to find other ways of mobilizing pedagogies of decolonial solidarity, ones which center relationships and are not as easily contained as territorial acknowledgments” (331).

Awareness, the authors conclude, citing Eve Tuck, does not necessarily enable change, and if awareness is the goal of territorial acknowledgments, then they are bound to fail to create substantive change. “Although some members of the group felt strongly that we should be building relationships of solidarity with Indigenous land defenders and tying land rights more strongly into our campaign asks, we continually failed to integrate these aims into our campaign,” they confess (331). The awareness generated by territorial acknowledgments did not lead to change. “The theory of change underpinning decolonial solidarity must be different and deeper than mere bids to raise awareness in the hopes that someday people will be willing to change,” they write. “Decolonization has to be about a renewed relationship to people, land, and ways of knowing, and the territorial acknowledgments in Fossil Free UofT did very little to lay the necessary preconditions for those shifts” (331).

This article is important, and I think the argument about the limitations of territorial acknowledgments is an important one. I’m reminded of the meme I saw last winter, as the RCMP tactical unit was mobilizing against Wet’suwet’en land defenders: a member of the tactical unit was saying “we acknowledge that this paramilitary action takes place on the territory of the Wet’suwet’en people.” And yet, even if awareness doesn’t lead to the kinds of change that the authors call for, it’s not nothing. In addition, I would be interested to see concrete examples of the kind of “renewed relationship to people, land, and ways of knowing” (331) the authors wanted to see among the settlers in the group they studied—perhaps concrete examples from some other group that did something more than utter territorial acknowledgments before their meetings—rather than aspirational statements about the kind of change they wanted to see in their group. I think that the kinds of epistemological and ontological changes they are calling for are a lot harder to put into practice, that it’s easier to call for such changes than it is to make them happen, and so I’m not surprised that a student group working to get their university to divest from the fossil fuel industry—a very difficult task, both legally and politically, as I learned when I was part of a group urging my university to divest from South Africa when I was an undergraduate student during the anti-apartheid era of the 1980s—was unable to simultaneously work towards the restitution of land to Indigenous peoples or to foreground Indigenous sovereignty at the same time. The kinds of changes they wanted to see happen, in fact, would likely be impossible in a group of disparate students who meet every couple of weeks; I think a wholesale ontological and epistemological shift for all of the members of such a group would take a much higher level of engagement. No wonder territorial acknowledgments were unable to help the group reach the goals the authors wanted them to reach. What actions could enable the group to reach those goals? I wish I knew.

In addition, I’m not sure what land restitution or “rematriation” would look like at the level of a group of students at the University of Toronto. What land would they be advocating be “rematriated”? To what First Nation? What would happen to the current possessor of that land? Yes, I know that according to the worldview the authors advocate be adopted by settlers, “possession” is the wrong word to use, but nevertheless, in legal terms, it’s the word one would have to use—and yes, I realize that our legal system is a settler-colonial construct, and yet the validity of Indigenous legal systems has yet to be recognized in this country. Does, for instance, the University of Toronto own land it would happily return to the Mississaugas at New Credit or the Haudenosaunee at the Six Nations of the Grand River? Would that institution’s board of governors ever entertain the notion of giving land away rather than selling it and adding the proceeds to its already massive endowment? Would a student group be able to convince the board to take such a step? I have trouble imagining such a thing. 

The repatriation or “rematriation” of Indigenous land and life is, as Tuck and Wang suggest, the goal of decolonial activity, but the granular details of how that restitution of land would take place are never clear. The actions that could be taken—purchasing and then donating land, for instance—are beyond the capacity of the group of students Asher, Curnow, and Davis write about, and giving away valuable assets, like land, to First Nations is beyond the imagination of settler institutions like universities or our provincial and federal governments. After all, those governments could, with the stroke of a pen, return Crown land to First Nations. I have trouble understanding how that imagination can be changed—how it could be decolonized—and without that change, I don’t understand how decolonization could happen. It would take an incredible amount of pressure from First Nations to get that kind of decolonization to take place, and while I can see how settler solidarity would figure in that kind of struggle, we are a long way from that kind of decolonization, which would actually repatriate Indigenous land. In the mean time, settlers would no doubt prefer to pretend that we don’t live on someone else’s land—to believe lies that make us comfortable, rather than dwell in unsettled discomfort. Is anyone surprised by people opting for comfort instead of its opposite?

In other words, how do we get to decolonization from the place we’re at right now? The path forward is not clear to me, and while aspirational goals are fine in theory, arguments that use the word “praxis” ought to consider what such a praxis would look like. There’s no doubt that territorial acknowledgments are insufficient, but what might be considered adequate? The answer to that question is not explained in this article, or in most of the work on settler-colonial theory I’ve read so far, with the exception of Eva Mackey’s book Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land, and Settler Decolonization, which describes a project undertaken by a group of settlers to buy a farm in New York and return it to the Seneca. And yet the answer to the question of how decolonization would work, of what practical steps one might undertake towards that goal, is central to the project of decolonization. I’m left dissatisfied and frustrated—can you tell?—and feeling that I ought to be doing something without knowing what that something might be. 

Work Cited

Asher, Lila, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis. “The Limits of Settlers’ Territorial Acknowledgments.” Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 3, 2018, pp. 316-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1468211. 

Battel-Lowman, Emma, and Adam Barker. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada,Fernwood, 2015.

Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. “Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, vol. 1, no.1, 2012, pp. 41-67.

Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén, and Alexandra Arráiz-Matute. “Pushing Against: Relationality, Intentionality, and the Ethical Imperative of Pedagogy.” Problematizing Public Pedagogy, edited by J. Burdick, J.A. Sandlin, and M.P. O’Malley, Routledge, 2013.

Onkwehonwe Rising (Rowland “Ena͞emaehkiw” Keshena Robinson). “‘Who’s Land?’ The Trials and Tribulations of Territorial Acknowledgment,” 18 October 2016, https://onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/whos-land-the-trials-and-tribulations-of-territorial-acknowledgement/.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization; Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.