Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement

In this article, Dylan Robinson, Kanonhsyonne Janice C. Hill, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Selena Couture, and Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen consider the performative and political efficacies of land acknowledgement. The article is an edited transcription of a plenary presentation at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research that took place on 30 May 2018 at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts Concert Hall in the city now called Kingston, in the province now known as Ontario. Each panellist was to think through the performance—the what it is we do—of acknowledgement by responding to a series of questions. Questions posed to the panellists included: Does the acknowledgement of Indigenous lands and waterways elide the acknowledgement of other forms of structural and epistemic violence within the specific contexts we work in as academics and artists? How might acknowledgement be aligned with a politics of recognition that is a continuation of settler colonial logics rather than a break from them? What must occur for acts of acknowledgement to transform into actions that effect Indigenous sovereignty? How might acknowledgement be ‘actioned’ differently by settler Canadians, ‘arrivants,’ immigrants, displaced peoples, and visitors? How can standardized forms of acknowledgement give way to context- and site-specific forms of redress?