Today we added a land acknowledgement to our Coracle Marketing website. We decided to do so for a few reasons. We thought we would share with you a bit of our journey in learning about Canada’s relationship with the Indigenous peoples and hopefully give you some reasons to consider including a land acknowledgement on your website as well.
While the recent news of the mass grave of 215 children’s bodies found at Kamloops Residential School has brought Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people into the spotlight, injustice toward Indigenous people has been longstanding and continues to this day. The journey of learning about this began for us in the Spring of 2017, when I (Olive) attended a gathering where I listened to two Indigenous speakers share about their experiences of being taken from their families and forced into adoption (in what has since been termed, the “Sixties Scoop.”) Despite being born and raised in Canada, I had never heard about this. After the gathering, I looked up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) “Calls to Action” to gain a better understanding of what happened and what steps we could take toward healing. At that gathering, I was also introduced to the practice of land acknowledgements.
Land acknowledgements are an Indigenous protocol, originating from well before European contact when people would introduce themselves by the land they were from. For settlers today, land acknowledgements “provide an awareness of Indigenous presence and land rights, [as well as] recognize privilege,” according to Dawn Saunders Dahl, Indigenous Program Manager at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. Indigenous writer Selena Mills explains it this way, “Part of the point in making land acknowledgements is to recognize how systemic and institutional systems of power have oppressed Indigenous peoples, and how that oppression has historically influenced the way non-Indigenous people perceive and interact with Indigenous peoples… [it’s] about introducing non-Indigenous people to this land’s accurate confederate history and the importance of relationship to land despite the dominant worldview of owning the land” (emphasis hers).
The land acknowledgement is a statement recognizing by name the Indigenous peoples whose lands we live and work on, and thanking them for taking care of these lands which they have had a relationship with since long before Canada was established. In British Columbia, ninety-five percent of the lands are traditional unceded First Nations territory. This means that the First Nations people never legally signed away their lands to the Crown or to Canada. It’s like we are guests who mistreated our hosts, took over the place, claimed it as our own, and never left.
For businesses today, doing the research to find out whose land you’re operating on and including a land acknowledgement on your website is a small and tangible way to move toward reconciliation with the Indigenous community. It demonstrates a posture of learning and honouring that is opposite to our history of dominating and destroying. At Coracle Marketing, we believe that businesses exist to serve our communities – and this includes participating in the reconciliation between Indigenous people and those of us who are settlers and have the privilege of benefitting from this land.
A land acknowledgement is but a first small step in the work of reconciliation. Perhaps this topic is relatively new to you but we encourage you to learn and keep seeking out opportunities to engage in reconciliation work. Tim and I still have a lot to learn but here is a list of resources we have found to be helpful, as a starting point:
Native-Land.ca – Find out whose land you are on
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) “Calls to Action” – read the calls to action that resulted from the TRC’s report
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s list of resources – read the report, as well as other documents and educational resources
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
If you are a Canadian business and including a land acknowledgement on your website is something important to you and you need assistance with this, contact us and we can help you as a complimentary service. It’s a small way we can practically participate in reconciliation work in Canada.
Coracle Marketing operates on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie), Semiahmoo, Kwantlen, S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), and other Coast Salish Peoples. We thank these First Peoples who continue to live on these lands and care for them, and whose relationship to these lands existed long before the founding of Canada or British Columbia.