Deconstructing land acknowledgements: from oral to cinematic expression

Abstract

What kinds of stories do we tell within the genre of land acknowledgements? What kinds of stories are we telling about ourselves in relation to the land? And how do land acknowledgments on film tell a different story than oral ones? After a brief discussion on the purpose and intention of the contemporary land acknowledgement, I will describe how Indigenous filmmakers go about acknowledging the territories where their stories are set in Falls Around Her (2018), Blood Quantum (2019) and Kayak to Klemtu (2017). Indigenous cinema often challenges the habit of locating treaty agreements in utterly past contexts as the act of acknowledging the land where the film is set is front and centre.

Imagine approaching a theatre, looking up and on the marquee, it says William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Cardinal, 2022). You go in, sit down and get comfortable. At some point, the curtains part and a man comes out onto the centre stage. There’s something strange about this man. He’s not wearing a ruffled collar. Instead, he’s a skinny dude with long hair and wearing a hoodie. He starts to speak,

They asked me to do the land acknowledgement tonight. I f***ing hate land acknowledgements. I find them so g*****n patronizing. You want me to come out in my beads and feathers and brown skin and bless your event. Tell you you’re ‘woke’. So I said I’d be delighted. (Cardinal, 2022, p. 8)

And he goes on, and on, and on, and on. For the entire duration of the play. What you get essentially is the world’s longest land acknowledgement, exploring the tragedies of colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty and a critique of the genre itself. ‘But only if we’d really acknowledge. . . . I Mean: I wanna acknowledge right now. The first thing I want to acknowledge . . . is that I’ve seen a lot of land acknowledgements’ (Cardinal, pp. 8–9; emphasis in original work). It’s the brevity of the land acknowledgement that Cree (a North American Indigenous people) playwright Cliff Cardinal takes issue with, and what other unexpecting patrons of the theatre, like about them: their perfunctory nature. The fact that the context is always different, yet the text is always somewhat the same: short and sweet and impersonal. Disney now includes a land acknowledgement before the Academy Awards broadcast. This is a company that lives and dies by its value on the stock market. But Mickey Mouse too recognizes their appeal:

The Academy would like to acknowledge that tonight we have gathered on the ancestral [emphasis added] lands of the Tongva [a Native American people in California, USA], the Tataviam [a Native American people in Southern California, USA] and the Chumash [a Native American people of the central and southern coastal regions of California, USA]. We acknowledge them as the first peoples of this land on which our motion-picture community lives and works. (Srikanth, 2020, para. 2)

Hollywood’s long history of relegating Indigenous peoples to the past, safely at-a-distance, in Westerns or pre-contact narratives gets a modern twist here.

Who am I when I acknowledge the land? As the son of an Indigenous man from Temagami, northeastern Ontario, Canada, and a non-Indigenous woman from a nearby town called Haileybury, I know what it means to be both guest and host or steward to the lands of so-called Canada. As a member of the Teme Augama Anishnabai (People of the Deep Water by the Shore, Temagami Region, northeastern Ontario, Canada) I experience my relationship to the place where I live and work – Nipissing First Nation’s homelands – as a guest and thus differently than I do my own. I honour the original stewards of this territory, the Nbisiing Anishinaabeg (an Indigenous people from the Lake Nipissing area, Ontario, Canada), and I refer to the treaty that applies to this land, a treaty that my unceded, Treaty-seeking First Nation has a love-hate relationship with to say the least, a treaty ignored, imposed and rejected all at once. I speak as a guest who aches for home which in my fortunate case, is less than 60 km away. So close, most days, I can feel it. But I am a guest on these lands who has the privilege of working with other guests, and who learns from the stewards of this land that often come in the form of students, students that teach me how they interact with the land and community, how they at times struggle to connect to the land and to community, and what they still must fight for. I know for instance that the Robinson Huron Treaty 1850 hasn’t lived up to all that it could be, but that we still must honour that treaty, a treaty, as I’ve said, that almost exists as tantalizing simulacrum or mirage of wealth and reconciliatory action. As a guest, I don’t want to overstep. As a neighbour and fellow steward, however, I feel I can share a few words from across the pines.

What kinds of stories do we tell within the genre of land acknowledgements? What kinds of stories are we telling about ourselves in relation to the land? Because if we just introduced the land, the land itself and all the life and spirits therein, just the land, Gaia (Mother Earth), nothing else, nothing extra, supplementary, not even our notions of the land, nothing from outside, alien, then wouldn’t we have to speak as the land speaks? It seems to me, we don’t acknowledge the land. We don’t call the land. Even in the most basic land acknowledgements, we – and here I mean settlers – are drawing attention to a chronological history of Indigenous presence, settler occupation, treaty-making and sometimes if we’re lucky, Indigenous resurgence and self-governance – you know, human drama stuff. Anishinaabe (a North American Indigenous people) scholar Joe Wark (2021) describes how the recent development of land acknowledgements in institutional settings coincided with state-backed calls for reconciliation and how they quickly became co-opted by settlers to expedite reconciliation and frame Indigenous-settler relations in more wholesome terms. Wark (2021) writes,

If land acknowledgements can serve to maintain the status quo in Canada, their potential to alter historical narratives is just as insidious. Land acknowledgements have been accused of erasing colonial violence and Indigenous presence, appropriating Indigenous culture, and refashioning histories of Indigenous habitation. Many land acknowledgements characterize non-Indigenous people as ‘guests’ on Indigenous lands. But guests are invited and presumably leave eventually. (p. 197)

Rarely do land acknowledgements describe the land or allow the speaker to be shaped by the lands we occupy. It’s telling that most land acknowledgements aren’t performed in Indigenous settings, yet they put us – and here I mean Indigenous people – in the starring role for a minute. Within the land acknowledgement, these little messages from the guests, all our relations – past, present and future – are conjured, and we are commanded to reconcile and steward the land. Someone’s got to do it! And perhaps we need this ritual injunction and spectral rapport with our ancestors. A meaningful enactment of biskaabiiyaang (returning to ourselves) for those present and those yet to come.

How much of settler history and identity should we expect in these types of introductory remarks? Should broken treaties and broken trust not also be tropes in the genre? By including the broken treaty on this territory, that for over 150 years annuities weren’t paid to First Nations for use of the land, or how treaty-making itself has been constricted in the case of Temagami First Nation, we tell a clearer story of how settlers forcefully took the position of host when they were originally guests, and how every host-guest relationship is always precarious. Why is it that in most land acknowledgments the imperative to redress and repair – which are loving acts – through pacts like the two-row wampum and its principle of co-existence and co-management of the land, gives way instead to an immaculate kind of relationality, as if with each new performance of the land acknowledgement, we press the hard reset button? University of Toronto (n.d.) includes many frustratingly imprecise yet typical words and phrases in its land acknowledgement:

I (we) [as written in original work] wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat [an Iroquoian-speaking nation of the Northeastern Woodlands, Canada and USA], the Seneca [an Indigenous Iroquoian-speaking people who historically lived south of Lake Ontario, USA], and the Mississaugas of the Credit [a First Nation, south-central Ontario, Canada] –. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. (para. 3; emphasis added)

Let’s make something clear amid the deconstruction: when settlers got here, it didn’t take long for them to behave like bad guests, taking what they wanted and teaching one another that they were justified via their sovereign. When they broke the treaties and kept on taking, they assumed the position of host. When treaty is broken – often before the ink even dries – and rights are taken away, land taken, people relocated or confined, the former guest becomes the sovereign host and thus treats the original host as guest or worse. These are the things that land acknowledgements seek to conceal, but they need not. It’s the brevity of land acknowledgements that we have an issue with. Land acknowledgement as story of conflict and perhaps reconciliation would give political agency to both parties. It has never been hard for Indigenous peoples to see right through this façade of treaty – the government adhered the Teme Augama Anishnabai to the Robinson Huron Treaty only when it was convenient for them, like when they denied us the ability to apply land cautions on n’Daki Menan, including sacred sites, to protect it from outside interests (Thorpe, 2012).

Doesn’t the ideal treaty mean that all of us are at once guest and host, united in cooperation and mutual respect, both respectful of and protector of the land? Sacred treaties between the people and the animals, the trees, the water were established thousands of years before settlers arrived – every time we put tobacco down or take only what we need we are reminded of the bond between us and the land. In ‘Our Treaty with the Hoof Nation’, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2013, pp. 9–12) retells a traditional oral story about the sacred agreement the Nishnaabeg (the people) made with the Hoofed Animals so that the latter would return to the territory after overharvesting drove them away. Protocols were developed to honour the lives of the deer, moose and caribou when they were killed to feed the Nishnaabeg. These protocols are how we play our part as guests and guardians of the land. The Nishnaabeg of Nipissing First Nation must take up the mindset of both guest and host. Host to all guests, able to offer direction to all the guests eager to learn and thrive in this territory, but also humble guests themselves to the land above all. But for this to happen we would need to redress the balance of relations with the wannabe host settlers or even those that think of this agreement as a 50/50 split. The land can’t be split just like it can’t be introduced. There is no beginning or end to the land, no up-and-coming neighbourhoods, no nationality, no borders, no divides and no language. The land requires our unconditional respect. I like it when Indigenous filmmakers acknowledge the land in their films because they never do it only with words. Rather, the filmmaker looks upon the land calmly and allows themself to be shaped by its story.

Where are you from? Who’s your family? How did you get here? How do you understand your responsibilities to the stewards of the land? The same questions that we silently expect of each other should be asked of settlers too. Instead of introducing the land, both settlers and Indigenous people should get in the habit of introducing themselves. Speaking as an Indigenous person, acknowledging the land is a ceremonial practise. There is no formula, there is no correct order and there is no political posturing. We don’t need more rote introductions to the land. Instead, we need to go out there and allow it to speak entirely for itself. Surely, it has something to say.

How do land acknowledgments on film tell a different story than their oral counterparts? Many films include location credits at the end that inform the viewer about the geographic shooting location. Usually, this information is connected to whatever tax savings or other financial incentives that were available to the production. But what is the difference between a land acknowledgement and location credit? Cinematic land acknowledgements provide indexical evidence of the ways land shapes and informs the work of the storyteller. There is a debt to the land and a respect to the land that impacts the story itself in Indigenous film. In Blood Quantum (Barnaby, 2019), Falls Around Her (Naponse, 2018) and Kayak to Klemtu (Hopkins, 2017), the act of acknowledging the land where the film is set is front and centre, and these cinematic land acknowledgements often challenge the habit of locating treaty agreements in an utterly past context. Typically understood as a type of paratext or extra-diegetic content, opening credits often contain written information about the people that made the film and often set the mood of the film. But for these Indigenous filmmakers, they also seem to gesture towards a web of human and more-than-human relations, including the land, that ushers in Story.

A film about how a small reserve community that fights off a zombie onslaught, Blood Quantum hypothesizes what would happen if Indigenous people possessed the minimum blood quantum that kept them immune from the deadly virus. When the frame starts to rotate during the film’s opening credits over a shot of the J. C. Van Horne Bridge near Listuguj, Quebec it creates an unsettling and disorienting view of a connecting structure. This bridge connects two provinces, two communities, including Indigenous and settler ones. This is the same bridge that police used to shoot rubber bullets onto Mi’kmaw (an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, Canada) fishermen in the early 1980s when the provincial government attempted to clamp down on the community’s fishing rights. There are several images in Blood Quantum that emphasize a world out of balance, indeed a world flipping upside down. An animated sequence shows effluent running into a lake but not before passing through a pregnant woman sitting on a rock. The film begins with shots next to, or from in the water, thus taking the point of view of the Turtle clan who has the widest perspective of the world, seeing both above and below the water, and whose primary goal is justice. The 180 degrees rotation on the bridge and demarcation of national boundaries suggests above all imbalance: we haven’t given enough weight to one side, we haven’t given enough weight to Indigenous sovereignty. The bridge is an exchange, but it can also represent the lack of reciprocity when pictured in a noir-inflected, canted frame. Barnaby is gesturing towards the imbalance of colonial uses of the land, and how the pollution is seeping into our territories. The unfettered access that settlers give themselves to the land leads to environmental imbalance. As a land acknowledgement, the opening credits of Blood Quantum paint a picture of conflict, and a view of the world that creates disharmony and rupture in terms of treaty relationships. A land acknowledgement like this doesn’t waste time on niceties and good intentions. And you must wonder – because Barnaby does point to the industry harming the environment – how much resistance to sickness is truly built in?

The overriding theme of many Indigenous films is the upside-down world, not to intentionally invoke Stranger Things (2016). To set the world right, to flip it back to its natural position, doesn’t mean an embrace of binary, that technology and nature can’t co-exist: they did in Indigenous communities. A more balanced approach requires us to redress past wrongs and steward the land together. But we’ve been flipped upside down for so long that finding balance will be a challenge.

I’m reminded too of the high angle shots, the bird’s eye view of the icy landscape, that opens Darlene Naponse’s (2018) Falls Around Her. This film tells the story of a famous Indigenous singer-songwriter who leaves her abusive manager behind in the city and returns to her northern reserve seeking a more peaceful existence. The cross-cutting between the theatre and the land in the film’s opening credits paints a portrait of an Anishinaabekwe (an Anishinaabe woman) with one foot in the city and one in the bush. There is value in that perspective, an agency in that international point of view because Naponse (2018) knows what’s waiting out there, beyond the bounds of her territory, those external forces that seek to pollute or destroy; she knows what’s waiting beyond her traditional territory. Hence, the importance of an environmental scan while we still can. In the opening credits, the camera adopts the position of Eagle clan who ensures cultural cohesion. Later in the film, there are also underwater shots that show life in microscopic scale. At one point, Anishinaabekwe activist Mary Laronde describes to the protagonist Mary Birchbark, played by Tantoo Cardinal, the pollution in the rivers caused by an old mining operation: ‘[T]he arsenic levels are rising’ (Naponse, 2018, 0:56:38). Colonialism is invisible to the naked eye often, but those are shots of redressing the balance, pained explorations of the insidiousness of colonialism and its estranging effects. Even at home there is pollution. That’s why Naponse (2018) is helping us see like our animal kin and dodems: to see the whole nation from the point of view of the Eagle or Crane, and like the turtle, see the injustice that is happening in the water. Her exploitative manager and tormentor comes into the story and reserve indirectly, disjointed, over the phone or through secondhand sightings, present but absent simultaneously, spectral. Mary Birchbark sings less loudly at home, in Atikameksheng (an Anishinaabe First Nation in Northern Ontario, Canada). There is so much imbalance, a world that is making us live less honestly and naturally, a world that is forcing us to take up the ways of the criminal to survive, as in Falls Around Her.

Blood Quantum’s opening credit sequence is much more ominous and dark. In Falls Around Her, the aerial perspective tells us that this film is about this territory and it will be about biskaabiiyaang – navigating one’s way back home and navigating one’s way out of an abusive relationship. It’s a film that wants to disturb us on the land because of the existential threats that have found their way onto the land, the home territory. Like in the film, the threats to home now are offscreen and not seen but heard. The sense of surveillance pervades, the sense of being watched, the internalization of surveillance is brought back with the Nishnaabeg, to the reserve. She can’t help but be different. Without words, we get an idea of where this film is set. This is the place that produced this story, these are my kin, and this land deserves our respect, the film seems to suggest. Cinematic land acknowledgements are different than spoken ones because treaty and people aren’t named. Instead, the land speaks for itself, and a non-human perspective of the land is hinted at. A non-linguistic land acknowledgement. Just a frame that speaks of the treaty with the land.

Zoe Leigh Hopkins’ (2017) Kayak to Klemtu begins with the camera flying over the ocean as it approaches the small community of Klemtu. At the same time, we hear Ella’s uncle Dave’s voice-over:

When I leave this earth, I wont be there to hear you testify for me. Do your best to speak for our land [emphasis added]. You can’t explain to these people what it’s like to come from such a special place. But you can tell them it deserves to be protected. (Hopkins, 2017, 0:00:51)

Ella, played by Ta’kaiya Blaney, is a young girl from Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation who must travel to Klemtu from Lund, British Columbia, to give testimony about the potential dangers of an oil pipeline crossing through her homeland. Her uncle Dave, played by Evan Adams, has recently passed away, but it’s his words that will fuel Ella along her coastal journey with her aunt and uncle to speak out at an important hearing in Klemtu. In the film’s opening sequence, the land is paired with the survivance of the dead uncle. Survivance is a concept that draws on philosophy and the wisdom of Indigenous intellectuals who see themselves as inheritors of the past lives of their ancestors. Indigenous peoples are survivors in a sense that they overcame multiple attempts to eliminate their culture and communities through various government-led programmes and policies. But we are also survivors in the sense that we represent and mourn our ancestors, like in any other culture. We come after them, but we carry them within us. In deconstructive terms, our relation to them is spectral, meaning asymmetrical. They regard us but we cannot speak to them, except in our dreams. Therefore, to speak for the land, or with the land, means to enter a web of relationality with rocks, plants, water, animals and finally our human relatives, all living beings that Indigenous peoples share bonds and sacred agreements with.

The lessons and teachings that are handed down to us come in the form of stories and memories. Retelling a story is hard, but sometimes it is the only way a culture can survive. Take uncle Dave’s, or Bear’s story, for instance. If Ella had simply forgotten it, would she feel compelled to kayak all the way to Klemtu to testify on behalf of Mother Earth? It’s not very likely. Her relationship and respect towards the land keeps her uncle’s story alive. There is a focus in the film on the youth and the future. Indeed, the two themes feed off each other and are pretty much unthinkable without each other. By having a young girl be the focus of a narrative about inheritance and resistance (she inherits her uncle Bear’s knowledge of the land and uses it to resist against the exploitation of the land), the film articulates a vision of the youth as those people – really a force – within our communities that are not bothered by negative stereotypes of old but rather use their ancestral knowledge to forge a path for an Indigenous future. Ella represents the youth of today and a movement that articulates ways of resilience and traditional ways of knowing. Her goal is to create a future that honours the past. Unlike her uncle Don, played by Lorne Cardinal, who tries to talk her out of her goal and reluctantly lends a hand only when things get potentially unsafe, and her mother, who refuses to take part in the journey, Ella is the only determined and driven descendent of her family. She is also the force that connects the past and the future.

In each of these opening credit sequences, the land is introduced, and symbolic connections and responsibilities are established between it and its original caretakers. The challenge or conflict of the films often hinges on whether Indigenous people will be allowed to continue to steward their homelands. These films – and many others, such as Trick or Treaty? (2014), Biidaaban (2018), Bootlegger (2021) and Wildhood (2021) – frame the land as always already the site of colonial violence, exploitation and alienation. The task for the storyteller and the Indigenous communities they represent will be to make biskaabiiyaang not only desirable but necessary.