Create your Indigenous Land Acknowledgement

Objective: Create identity statements, properly using gender pronouns and Indigenous land acknowledgements. (self-knowledge, application, perspective)

Learning

Explore the Indigenous heritage of the land where you grew up, where you live, where you work, where you want to live after college. Use these two tools to find out which Indigenous groups are native to your area.

Native Land Digital

Native Land Digital (interactive map)

This map shows the territories of Indigenous groups in North America and other areas affected by settler colonization (South America, Australia and Aotearoa, and parts of Africa and northeastern Europe). Since many Native groups were nomadic or semi-nomadic, the territories shown on this map are larger and more overlapping than you might expect. You can also switch it to look at language regions and treaty boundaries, rather than territories. If you click on a location, the map will give you a list of websites for Indigenous organizations associated with that area. The treaty information on this website is not detailed enough for this assignment, so you will also need to use the next resource.

Invasion of America

Invasion of America (interactive map)

Slate: Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans (with article)

"Invasion of America" is a provocative title, but it forces the reader to think about the westward expansion of the United States from a different perspective. The Slate article gives a brief explanation of the interactive map and links to it. You can watch the time lapse of the removal of Native Americans from their land and the creation of and shrinking of Indian Reservations, with dates ticking at the bottom. You can also pause the time lapse at a particular date or inspect a particular location. This resource does have specific information about treaties—who ceded what land when and where. Use this to determine which Indigenous people to acknowledge with the land.

Your Assignment

Write an Indigenous land acknowledgement that fits your location and your posture toward the people of that place. Here are some resources to guide your work.

How to write an Indigenous land acknowledgement

The Native Governance Center offers A Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgement. They also provide Beyond Land Acknowledgement: A Guide. Use these to prepare your land acknowledgment and your plan for what it means and what you will do with it.

Examples 

Canada is ahead of the United States on this effort. The University of Manitoba's Traditional Territories Acknowledgement is a a good example along with other relevant policies and practices. In the UP, NMU has the Center for Native American Studies and has a history of making efforts to acknowledge and celebrate the Native presence in their community. Our neighbors on the Keweenaw, Finlandia University, adopted an Indigenous land acknowledgment in 2022 and present it as part of their History & Heritage. MTU does not have an official land acknowledgement statement, but the most commonly used acknowledgement can be found on the webpages of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion and the Library. Another was created for Great Lakes Research Center and offers the best active language.

Once you have learned whom to acknowledge and how, create your own Indigenous land acknowledgement. Add it to your professional presence as appropriate and submit it below.

You are not being graded on this assignment in any way. This assignment is here to help us evaluate the effectiveness of the learning module and to assess student engagement and learning more broadly.