Acknowledging

Abstract

At the University of Toronto (U of T), and at many other institutions in Canada, we increasingly offer Indigenous land acknowledgements at the beginning of each formal event. Orientation events, each conference, the formal installation of new university officials. Public schools in Toronto still sing the national anthem, but it is preceded by a land acknowledgement. These acknowledgements are one of the outcomes of a fraught series of apologies for various forms of colonial violence over Indigenous people (see McElhinny, 2016a, b). I want to think, here, about acknowledgements and about citations which can be another form of problematic acknowledgement, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui notes (2012: 101). Failure to cite, and to acknowledge, is a problem, but certain forms of acknowledgement are a problem too (Critical Ethnic Studies Citation Practices Challenge Tumblr, McElhinny et al, 2003). Rivera Cusicanqui notes that “[I]deas run, like rivers, from the south to the north and are transformed into tributaries in major waves of thought... ideas leave the country converted into raw material, which become regurgitated and jumbled in the final product” (2012: 104). She means by this that ideas, people, are extracted from the South, and transformed into products that, yet again, benefit the North. The metaphor does not entirely work for this place, and that is one way we need to acknowledge the land. Here, in Toronto, the rivers mostly run from north to south. So we’re thinking, too, about how to better acknowledge this, a question which is in part about how to better centre Indigenous understandings. Who and what is one supposed to cite? Who or what is not cited? When can a form of citation be a form of honoring? The land acknowledgement, approved in June 2016 by our University’s Governing Council, and its Indigenous Council of Elders, arises, in part, because of a national conversation on Truth and Reconciliation. From the mid-19th century to late into the 20th century, the Canadian government and various churches seized