Land acknowledgements have become a more frequent introduction to meetings, conferences, convocations, graduations, and more. Even though it isn’t yet common practice inside courthouses and courtrooms, anti-racist advocates ought to consider composing and adding land acknowledgements to their websites and incorporating land acknowledgments when introducing themselves. Example: “I’m Ben Chan. I’m based in New York City, the ancestral home of the Lenape people.” Used as a tool and a “…countermeasure to erasure – such statements publicly recognize the presence of Native people prior to European arrival and their continued relationships and claims to a territory.
Used as a race equity tool, the goal is to move beyond a performative land acknowledgement and towards genuine relationships with Native community members”. Further, incorporating genuine land acknowledgements into our spaces reminds us that Indigenous people are still here and are not relics of the past.
Such statements that disrupts our life and legal practice “as usual” l can serve an important role in our civic and cultural life. Non-Native people live in the United States at the expense of Indigenous communities. This violent truth is conveniently left out of the spaces where we can engage with our national history but is certainly not welcome in any other place where people live their daily lives – going to the store, living in their homes, attending school, going to places of worship. How would it transform our society if we lived with the knowledge that everywhere we go in the United States is Indigenous land? A land acknowledgement statement can provide that necessary moment of reframing.”