Notes Toward a Water Acknowledgement

Abstract:Land acknowledgements remind those of us who are not Métis, Inuit, or members of one of the First Nations that we live and work on Indigenous territory. This talk proposes a supplement to that necessary task in the form of a water acknowledgement. Indigenous as well as Black aquatic histories and knowledges make clear that, like land, oceans, rivers, and lakes have been and remain contact zones and contested spaces. Focusing on Indigenous Pacific wayfinding, this talk looks to a water acknowledgement as one way to open Victorian studies to alternative methodologies in hopes of transforming our grasp of relations between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century as well as in the twenty-first.