How can theatre companies get Indigenous land acknowledgments right?
That statement, adapted from the official land acknowledgement from the City of Toronto (updated as of February), should sound familiar if you’ve attended virtually any kind of public arts event in the last few years. But now, dissenting voices have started picking them apart. They can sound detached, shallow and give a false sense of progressive accomplishment when delivered by settler, often white, organizations and artists.
Anishinaabe writer, educator and Indigenous policy adviser Hayden King is one of the most vocal critics of land acknowledgments as they’re currently being practised. In his talk “Welcome to My Territory, Please Leave: Politics of a Land Acknowledgement,” given recently at Ryerson University, he said that our mainstream style of land acknowledgments actually cause harm to the people they’re supposed to celebrate.
“All major cities in Canada today have a land acknowledgement. Yet in each of these jurisdictions, with each of these land acknowledgments, there is active and ongoing disposition of Indigenous people,” he said.
In fact, King argues that land acknowledgments play a larger part in the plan of white settlers to erase Indigenous people from society, a process that continues to respond to pivotal moments in Indigenous activism such as the Idle No More movement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Cynthia Lickers-Sage, a Mohawk visual artist from the Six Nations reserve and executive director of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance, believes that resources like Native-Land.ca, an interactive map that geographically lays out Indigenous territories, languages and treaties, and the information provided by Toronto’s Generator website can help performers and companies craft a land acknowledgement, but that shouldn’t be the end of the process.
She recalls a conversation with the director of a well-known theatre company in Toronto, proud of how the organization had its youth performers work with local elders on land acknowledgments for each stop while on tour, which were now being provided to other companies travelling to the same areas.
“I felt a little bad because I didn’t respond as excitedly as she expected. I said, ‘This is fantastic, the only thing is that when you’re telling people, you’re robbing them of the experience.’ I would be more interested in hearing from those students about their relationship to the land. I would be more interested in a how-to document,” she said.
With varying definitions and perspectives within Indigenous communities themselves, even those within the same area, Lickers-Sage says standardizing land acknowledgments is futile. Including more personal information about the speaker’s own research and relationship to the land goes farther than listing the area’s nations.
Then again, she remembers one example where a performance company expanded upon their own family histories immigrating to Canada.
“I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting, you just did a five-minute land acknowledgement and then spent the last 10 seconds about the Indigenous people’ … we have to go one step a little deeper and speak to people from the community about their experience and connection to the land,” she said.
Another solution is to include Indigenous artists in the creation and delivery of a land acknowledgement, either providing a physical presence or, as Cole Alvis, a Métis artist with Chippewa, Irish and English heritage, used while working on Nina Lee Aquino’s production of The Drawer Boy last year, a pre-recorded message.
“It was important that we recognize Craig Lauzon as an Ojibway person playing the role of Angus in (Aquino’s) identity-conscious casting of the well-known play by Michael Healy. (The recording) provided an opportunity for the audience to hear from him and myself, the two Indigenous artists on the production, without requiring him to transition immediately from a preshow Indigenous protocol into the opening moments of the play,” he wrote to the Star.
Williamson Bathory’s land acknowledgement during her production of Kiviuq Returns this January at Tarragon Theatre explored the play’s themes as well as its wider cultural context, which only that particular cast and crew could have performed.
“We had a small baby in our group, the daughter of one of the stage managers, and she came onstage every day for the land acknowledgement. We introduced her to the audience, who all inevitably waved at her and cooed and awed. We then brought forth the tremendous amount of conflict, abuse, neglect, trauma and hurt we could name just briefly that has taken place on Indigenous lands against Indigenous people in recent history … and named the colonized trauma that Inuit have also experienced and still experience today,” she said, adding that the conflict at the Unist’ot’en camp in British Columbia and the apology to the Ahiarmiut people in Nunavut were both referenced onstage.
Nevertheless, she says this is a learning process for all involved, and she is impressed by the good intentions behind the popularization of land acknowledgments. But a change in mindset is necessary to move forward.