“It’s one thing to say, ‘Hey, we’re on the territory of the Mississaugas or the Anishinaabek and the Haudenosaunee.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘We’re on the territory of the Anishinaabek and the Haudenosaunee and here’s what that compels me to do” – Hayden King, 2019.
At the recent 2022 APA Pacific Division Meeting in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of presenting the initial thoughts of this blog post during the AAPT-APA Pacific Teaching Hub Poster Session. In reflection of my first-time experience being a Course Instructor, I wrote in my abstract that “when compiling the syllabus, I initially had included the pre-written Land Acknowledgement provided by the university, as mostly everyone does.” During the actual session, it came as a surprise to learn how unused land acknowledgements are by many of my American colleagues.
Mainly, land acknowledgements are statements in which people acknowledge the histories and relationships indigenous peoples have had with the territory where one is. In Canada, land acknowledgements have been integrated into the beginnings of events, morning announcements at many schools, as well as the main focus of this blog post, university syllabi. Land Acknowledgements are stated at the beginnings of meetings, conferences, workshops, and are used far and wide within the Humanities disciplines at Canadian and some American universities.
In some circles, there tends to be pushback against the use of land acknowledgements. They are criticized as being rote, repetitive, and irrelevant in classrooms. Growing up in Toronto and seeing the start of land acknowledgements’ use in High School and University settings in the mid-2010s, this is an opinion that I have held as well. However, this perspective ignores the important, pedagogical and ethical values land acknowledgements hold for both students and teachers.
On the flip side, we see a more critical approach to the rote/repetitive nature of land acknowledgements as used by institutions. Led by indigenous writers like Hayden King, Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, Chelsea Vowel, and more, this position criticizes the use of land acknowledgements as “something one has to get through,” in which it does not provide anything substantive in response to historical and ongoing realities.
As Hayden King asserts in the quote above, land acknowledgements should be understood as a call to action. While pre-written land acknowledgements are a great first step at bringing to light histories that colonial educations have ignored, especially when developed by indigenous people, the sole act of copy and pasting, or reading it out loud once at the beginning of your class and forgetting about it the rest of the year, trivializes its potential. Put differently, as Chelsea Vowel puts it, how can we go “beyond territorial acknowledgements”?
In my first-time teaching Trans Studies, I had organized the initial classes on methodology. The readings I had assigned included now-classic philosophically-oriented texts from Judith Butler, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker. These texts, which I had categorically placed as the “beginnings” of trans theory, also have their roots in Western theoretical canonical texts from poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault. Along with those texts, in the syllabus I also had the copy and pasted land acknowledgement from the University of Toronto.
Though, upon reflection on Hayden Kings’ regret, a wonderful workshop held by Bonnie Jane Maracle on Personalizing Land Acknowledgements, and Andrea Sullivan-Clarke’s excellent article in the APA Newsletter for Native American and Indigenous Philosophy, “Relations and How Allies Acknowledge Land”, I wanted something else. Something more. As Sullivan-Clarke writes,
“many of the [land acknowledgement] statements used by non-indigenous institutions are speech acts that fail. If the goal is reconciliation, then the context of these statements must change … decolonial allies should be aware of these worries and ensure that this practice is not merely appropriated in order to alleviate settler colonial guilt.”
As such, I had to reconsider where I should “begin” in Trans Studies. Disciplinary beginnings of trans studies in the late 80s and 90s give the sense that the field is relatively new. Yet, reaching back historically to diverse indigenous embodiments of gender and sexuality, and starting with the erasures caused by colonialism serves as a better and more accurate beginning. Working to decolonize one’s curriculum through the call of acknowledging one’s presence as a guest on indigenous land helped me reconceive my course and concepts.
There is an irony as well to how indigenous and decolonial content is used within Trans and Gender Studies related courses. This irony stems from a critique Kate Drabinski writes of trans inclusion in Women’s Studies courses. As she writes, “[trans issues] tend to be taught in the ‘special guest’ model, never central in their own right and always interesting insofar as they illuminate more clearly ‘women’s’ issues,” issues that are conceptualized as somehow distinct from trans issues.” Similarly, topics on decolonization and indigeneity tend to have the same “special guest” style, if not worse. Relegated to one isolated week, or the sole reference to a land acknowledgement before the beginning of the year.
What the historical retelling of trans philosophy allows is not solely a “foil” for transness, but a reconsideration of how we imagine trans embodiments and futurities. To set action to a land acknowledgement meant for me to decolonize my syllabus and expand beyond canonical texts. Beginning methodologically with the colonial erasure of third gender identities as shown in Deborah Miranda’s “Extermination of the Joyas” as well as the current reclamation of historical embodiments as in Kai Pyle’s “Naming and Claiming: Recovering Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit Language” allows for a greater critique of what “trans” even means. Creating a course narrative that interweaves indigenous and decolonial content throughout the year works to replace foundations that have historically been race blind, class blind, and Western. This retelling is not only present in asking yourself what content is being taught, but further in how you structure your lectures, the classroom environment, and even assignment development.
Trans studies has already set itself apart from the confines of poststructuralist and queer theories, but “decolonizing trans” as Ani Dutta and Raina Roy put it, is an important next step in reframing how and what we teach about (trans)gender. And this is not an answer to a call that is only relevant to trans studies and philosophies. Rather, rethinking one’s relationship to the land and indigenous methodologies in relation to one’s field, research, and teaching can be done by anyone.
Sam Sanchinel
Sam Sanchinel (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Women and Gender Studies program at the University of Toronto. Their dissertation focuses on a pairing of transgender studies with continental philosophy of religion, to aim at understanding trans identity as a type of prophecy. Their latest paper “Tengo Sueño: a cross-generational Latinx dream of borders, religion, and trans identity” concerns generational Latina/x identities at the intersection of religion and transness.
