Land Acknowledgement

The land we stand on today is the territory of the Dish with One Spoon wampum belt covenant, the lands of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Anishinaabe and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. For countless generations First Nations communities have passed on the lesson that this land must be shared and stewarded by all who take part in using it. The land that we currently know as Toronto was purchased and treatied by settlers through the Toronto Purchase, Treaties 13 and 19, and the Williams treaties that make up much of Scarborough, Pickering, Ajax and Whitby in the eastern Toronto area. Many of these treaties were fractured by settlers and are contested, and continue to cause harm to First Nations communities. As many of us are newcomers and settlers on this land we must be mindful of these broken covenants and strive to make this right, with the land, and in relationship with First Nations communities and with each other.

Today in Toronto, the right to determine how land is stewarded and cared for is still denied to First Nations, and land continues to be taken by the highest bidder. The right to determine who gets to live where, on what parcels of land, and who gets the right to a home and who gets displaced is granted to the property-owning settler residents of this city. We need to rectify this, not simply acknowledge or recognize it. This should be done through land rematriation – the material return of land – through reparations, and through the caring work of repairing relationships with land, more than human kin, and between each other as humans. To move and speak gently with one another, with the living world, and the spirit world. Our relationship with the natural world should be an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude, as Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us.