We are committed to principles and practices of decolonization, including settler responsibility for honouring the treaties and rematriating this land to Indigenous trust before the work of collaboration can be undertaken in good faith. We would like to be held accountable for the ways I perpetuate legacies of harm as an uninvited inhabitant of this land. We support the restoration and protection of Indigenous people’s land and resource rights for the benefit of all.
There is no prosperity without flourishing Indigenous communities.
There is no freedom without Indigenous liberation.
It is very difficult and deeply problematic to acknowledge the land we are on and the history it holds in a static format. A fresh and specific acknowledgement is written by a different participant for each of our events and meetings.
Without community there is no liberation.
– Audre Lorde
Settler Responsibility
Presently, all five organizers of StrongHold hold settler privilege, and with it comes settler responsibility, including our responsibility to make our events and meetings: accessible, desirable, relevant, and responsive to indigenous members of our community, while moving toward something collaborative.
Present Understanding
We understand the need to avoid Indigenous homogenization and tokenism.
We understand it will take sustained effort to earn and build trust.
We understand that any effort we make to build trust may also cause harm.
We are committed to participating in the work of unsettling and decolonization. At the same time that we are afraid of replicating or amplifying harm, we are also eager to contribute to the work of unsettling and decolonization.
We recognize, as settlers, our contributions must be comprised of actions that begin with listening and learning — not for a singular right answer, but listening and learning as our primary role in the dialogue of unsettling and decolonization.
We cannot take responsibility for what we are not willing to acknowledge.
We acknowledge, as settlers, that we benefit directly from the historical and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people, including the brutal and systemic theft of Indigenous children by the state through overt and covert means, as well as misappropriation of the land we are on, and the resources of this land.
At her generous and offered-by-donation workshop on Indigenous Land Acknowledgements, and after acknowledging what a problem it is for her as a Dene woman to be offering this workshop on Blackfoot land, Michelle Robinson sometimes begins with the question: what exactly are we acknowledging here?
Throughout the workshop she emphasizes the importance of connecting the land with its historical context and tying that to the specific aims of the gathering that would be taking place on the land, and commitments, in action, toward the sorts of reparations that need to be in place for reconciliation to even be possible.
As an organization, we are brand new at a lot of things, including settler responsibility. We are grateful for the unearned patience we experience from cisgender and Two-Spirit Indigenous community members as we learn how to take responsibility for ourselves.
Acknowledgement - StrongHold QSA #1 - May 14, 2019
StrongHold – QSA#1
Land Acknowledgement
Pahtsa’pi
I have no right to welcome you to this land, and as an organization we have not yet
made the time to connect with the elders, with the people who are the traditional guardians of this land.
Pahtsa’pi
With respect to Michelle Robinson, who taught me some of these ways of
acknowledging our meeting place, on the lands where the two rivers meet.
These traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, including the Siksika, the Piikani,
the Kainai; the traditional lands of the Tsuut’ina; the traditional lands of the Chiniki,
Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations of the Stoney Nakoda peoples; the lands of the
Métis Nation of Alberta, region 3; lands hosting all Treaty Seven signatories, their descendants, relations, guests, and settlers.
These lands that have been meeting place, trading place, peace-making place of many Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island for thousands of years. Lands and peoples who have endured.
Lands and people. The steadfast guardians of our connection to life itself.
With respect to all Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, we gather here.
We gather here in Mokhintsis (sign).
We gather here to share our stories, to be in community, to hold one another in care and kindness. To hold accessibility and accountability at the centre of our actions and our intentions.
We gather here to open ourselves to possibility.
We gather here to speak honestly and clearly about hard things and that which makes our way through hard things more easeful.
We gather here in this space to open to curiosity, to open to possibility, to open to joy.
Where curiosity, possibility, joy, and even openness are too tall an order, may we lean — just a little — in the direction of relief.
May we acknowledge, as we gather here tonight, that this land is weary of the unspeakable violence that has taken place and continues to take place here.
We are gathered here in peace.
May we acknowledge, as we gather here tonight, that harm has been caused on this land and to this land. May we acknowledge that between us here in this very moment, dynamics of harm are in place.
May we acknowledge that many of us here this evening have — even with the very best intentions, often with the full authority offered to us by our beliefs, our vocations, our professions — have caused harm and continue to cause harm. We, parents, teachers, social workers, doctors, police, members of the military, we who have authority over another’s autonomy — we have an extra duty of acknowledgement here.
Acknowledgement is not enough, but it is enough for tonight, may we simply acknowledge that for whatever mix of giving and receiving, that the story of our cells, of our histories in these bodies, within the lineage of our ancestors, within the history of our community, our intentions and our actions are connected in some way to harm — trauma transmitted.
Let us sit in acknowledgement for a moment. (Pause)
May we acknowledge that we also gather here in this space, together with each other, and with all the gifts, skills, hard work, lucky breaks, and community that got us here.
May we acknowledge our strengths, our resilience, our desire that our actions and words come together with our best intentions.
May we take a moment to acknowledge the miracle of our heart and our lungs.
The steadfast guardians of our connection to life itself.
May we take a moment to love ourselves enough to hold one another in unconditional positive regard for the next three hours. Let us offer everyone here, this evening, for these specific three hours the benefit of our doubt — which is not the same as suggesting we forgive and forget.
May we take a moment to acknowledge the love and liberation at the centre of each of us, at the centre of this event.
May we take a moment to acknowledge the youth in this room.
May we honour the courage of our community’s youth who, like a magnet, have drawn us all here, who have created every part of this evening with the power of their need that we step up for them right now.
May we honour all the 12-21 year-olds in this room and all the 12-21 year-olds who would be here if they could and all the 12-21 year olds who could never be in this room. (Pause)
May we honour the power, kindness, courage, strength, savy, and wonder of our youth.
May we thank them.
May we acknowledge the great and deep honour it is to see our youth, to know them, to offer what space and support we can as their lives unfurl with all the tenderness and tenacity of a forest fern; with the tallness and heartiness of the perennial prairie grasses; as they hold strong with the splendour and ruggedness of our mountains to the West.
May we acknowledge the needs of our youth.
You are our youth, and you are wonderful.
May we act as guardians, as parents, as friends, as allies, as the accomplices of youth in this great caper of getting away with becoming into the whole of who they are without lasting apology or shame for their gender, or the genders of those they share their love with — however that love, consensually, expresses itself.
May we acknowledge our youth and our responsibility to tend our youth.
And, for those of us a little older, gathered here to day. May we take a moment to acknowledge the 12-21 year old selves within us.
We endured. We outlasted. We survived. We thrived. We flourished.
We, with the help of each other, with the help of our own accomplices and allies have brought out 12-21 year old selves with us today.
We may not have come through the initiation of maturing into adulthood unscathed — what sort of initiation would that be? — but we have come through.
We are the adults now, some of us elders. We each have our biological and logical families, we have the people who love us — known and unknown; we have the people we love; we have the places we sleep at night; we are the future we could have barely imagined all those decades ago.
We have our precious human lives and we brought ourselves through.
We brought ourselves though.
We brought ourselves through.
May we take a moment to acknowledge the adults and elders here tonight. The adults and elders who would like to be here tonight but could not be. The adults and elders of our community who did not come through, who could not be here in body tonight.
(Pause)
May we take a moment to acknowledge the people in this room, the straight and cisgender among us who are here to offer their hearts and hands in support of our collective work, our collective liberation.
(Pause)
May we take a moment to acknowledge that a room full of hope is also a room full of history and fear — no one wants to be hurt. No one wants to cause hurt.
In the Spirit and tradition of my own lineage, we ask that all unnecessary pain in this room be pulled, cleared, cancelled, resolved on all levels, all directions, space, time, and all lifetimes.
May we ask that all unnecessary fear be pulled, cleared, cancelled, resolved on all levels, all directions, space, time, and all lifetimes.
May we ask that all free-floating projections and distortions be pulled, cleared, cancelled, resolved on all levels, all directions, space, time, and all lifetimes.
As we acknowledge the presence of fear, may we take a moment to acknowledge that our gathering today on this land where the two rivers meet, is also full of love, full to the brim and overflowing with love.
May we witness the love in this room.
May this work nurture and nourish it.
May we acknowledge the best of ourselves and each other. May we have a moment to open to and acknowledge the presence of love here, in this very place, at this very moment in time.
It is Tuesday, and we are alive. We are gathered here today, in love.
May we honour that love with our work this evening. May we honour that love in our interactions.
It is Tuesday and we are alive.
Thanks to the endurance of this land and the Peoples who are its traditional guardians, we are gathered here.
Together, may we live. May we love. May we endure. May we outlast. History tells us,
we will survive. We always have. May we thrive. May we grow. May we blossom and bear fruit.
We are here, flourishing together.
When I go to events that are held by Indigenous people here in Mokhintsis (sign), the Indigenous person offering acknowledgement often asks that we gather in a good way.
I do not have enough understanding of what that means and I am not empowered to ask that. But may we acknowledge that Indigenous ways of gathering for thousands of years on this land are holding us here in this very gathering.
May we acknowledge we have so much to learn and listen to.
Okay. We are gathered here together today.
(Oki. Kitsiiksikisma tsimmohpowaawa (sign))
Pahtsa’pi.
Indigenous people, of this land and all around it, pahtsa’pi.
We will do better.
We must.
We will.
May we acknowledge love and liberation are arm-in-arm. There is no victory for one without victory for the other.
Okay. We are gathered here together today. In love. In liberation. In peace. To support our community’s youth, and our community’s healing.
(Oki. Kitsiiksikisma tsimmohpowaawa (sign))
With grateful acknowledgement,
On behalf of StrongHold,
Nathan Viktor Fawaz
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