Land acknowledgement is truth telling about the land that we live and work on, about its past and present. Three conservation biologists and a social worker join in a conversation about what land acknowledgement is and why it matters. This is Part I of two podcasts on the topic of Land Acknowledgement.
Episode 1-002. Land Acknowledgement. What is it?
Gail: I would be interested to know how you came to this and sort of why Calvin is considering this right now.
Penny: I was involved in an event with the Kauffman Interfaith Institute. And as we were doing that planning, honestly, I don't know why, but I said to the organizers, to the team that was organizing the event: I think we should have a land acknowledgement before we begin this event. Do you have one that you standardly use? And my partner at the Kauffman Institute said, “Yes we do. I'll make sure to include it.” And at that point I thought: we need to do this more.
And, it's just a start, I know, and it's a small start, But I had been at a couple different events where I had seen that happen, and I felt like it was something that we needed to take seriously and we needed to start doing as a Community practice. So, for me it was just actually this year at a virtual event planning committee that I thought: this is something we need to start doing, and then I realize that you guys were already doing this work in really wonderful ways. And I reached out to some different people and then, you know, so-and-so told me about so-and-so, and here we are.
And as I was thinking about different diversity and inclusion initiatives at Calvin University, I wanted to include also different diversity and inclusion initiatives that fly a little under the radar, that aren't the usual suspects, and this is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to highlight and that I thought would be potentially useful to other people in other organizations to think about. Yeah, what is this land acknowledgement issue? How can it be something we can, you know, start thinking about and embrace as a first step in a process towards justice.
Intro:
Welcome to the Diversity & Inclusion for All project. Information, insights and inspiration. This project is supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. The views expressed in this podcast reflect individual perspectives and experiences, and are not necessarily policies or positions of Calvin University. Together we can listen to important perspectives, builds our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Today we're talking with four colleagues from Calvin University about the issue of land acknowledgements and my colleagues today are Joe Kuilema, Gail Heffner, Dave Warners, and Will Miller. I'm going to ask each of them in turn, to just introduce themselves a little bit and talk about or tell a little bit about how or why they've come to this topic of land acknowledgement.
Why don't we start with Gail?
Gail: I am recently retired from Calvin. I am in the process of working on a book with Dave Warners about the Plaster Creek watershed and about reconciliation ecology, and I think my on-ramp for thinking about land acknowledgement goes back a bit to the work I've done in anti-racism, so I haven't thought as much about indigenous issues until recently. I would say I've been thinking more about marginalized groups that are of African descent primarily. I guess in the past.
But in the work that Dave and I are doing on this book on reconciliation ecology, we've been doing a lot to look at Native Americans and the history of indigenous people in West Michigan and in the process of writing and thinking about that --that's really where I've started thinking more about land acknowledgement
I think another thing that's um a part of my on-ramp or my thinking about land acknowledgement really goes back to an experience I had teaching in New Zealand and we interacted with the interim class that I taught in New Zealand, which is you know about 10 years ago now. We interacted a lot with the Maori. And the indigenous people in New Zealand are so, so much more connected to the land and to the landscape than the average American is. And when you when you meet they often will introduce themselves by telling you about the mountain that's closest to them or the watershed from which they come and their connection to the land really prompted me thinking a lot more about how that connects to the work we're doing in the Plaster Creek watershed, and so that's, I think, that's another small part of what brings me to start caring about our relationship with indigenous people in West Michigan.
Penny: Dave, I'm going to ask if you could introduce yourself and maybe say of extra few sentences about the Plaster Creek stewards projects.
Dave: Sure, so my name is Dave Warners and I'm a professor in the biology department here at Calvin.
My thinking about this probably started as a young child. I grew up right here in West Michigan in Grand Rapids. And I was always aware of the Indian Mounds. There's Indian Mounds drive and you know in West Michigan we have certain Indian names. Ottawa Hills, Ken-o-shea Drive, etc. And so I I grew up with this kind of intrigue about the history of non white people. In West Michigan over the years, I, you know, learn more about many of the injustices that were dealt to Native Americans by European immigrants. And then, the work that Gail and I had started with the Plaster Creek stewards. The effort to mobilize people in the Plaster Creek watershed, which is the watershed in which Calvin University is located. Try to mobilize people to start to really care for this Creek because it is so contaminated, in desperate need of some restoration. As part of that project, you know, we …we were very interested in learning how is it that a Creek could become so contaminated so that it's unsafe for people to touch? Children should not play in that Creek. And how is it that we would allow a Creek like this flowing right through neighborhoods to become so degraded.
So, Gail and I have been doing some research work and looking back into the history of the human presence here in this watershed in West Michigan. You don't have to look very hard to realize that for a very long time, thousands of years actually people lived in this watershed and the Creek was not a problem. The Creek was in fact a blessing. It helped to sustain people and other animals, and it's only in the matter of, you know, the last 150 years over a lifetime of 1213 thousand years that the Creek has become so degraded.
Then we started, you know, looking at that transition period as part of our research and trying to understand what is it, you know, when the Europeans came over what was part of their mindset that contributed to this degradation of the Creek that wasn't part of the mindset of the indigenous people who lived here before them, like the Hopewell and the Ottawa. What became really clear through that? There's some really significant injustices that were done to the native peoples here and to the land that the native people occupied. It was… it was a package deal, so to speak. There was a real superiority complex, a sense of exceptionalism. A sense of manifest destiny. It was tie-in very strongly with religious persuasions that the Europeans brought over. And they saw themselves as superior, not only to the land and that the land should be worked to help them specifically, but also superior to the native peoples. And I think for me I knew that there were some injustices. dealt to native peoples. But then as I started reading some of these historical documents and looked into the history of my place, you know, right here in West Michigan and reading the names of some of the founding fathers that I had sort of been taught in my history classes to admire/think highly of, it really came close to home that, wait a second, it's just not something that happened broadly. It happened right here. It happened right in this watershed as people were treated extremely poorly, unjustly, cruelly, and so then that started me thinking more about what do we do about this? How can we address this injustice? So that's led me to thinking more about land acknowledgement statements, as well as activities that can happen that would go along with that or emerge out of such a recognition.
Penny: Joe Kuilema, I wonder if you could introduce yourself a little and how you come to this Topic.
Joe: Yeah, my name is Joe Kuilema. I teach in sociology and social worker Calvin so I'm a social worker and I would say my primary connection to this has been personal at first and then moving into what I teach. So my wife is a nurse practitioner and she got a job out of Calvin working as a nurse at the Huron band of the Potawatomi's Clinic here in town and that was the beginning of our relationship with the local native communities. Meeting folks. Listening to elders. Really diving into that community, and I think since then it's been an ongoing unfolding of: alright, what does this mean for us to have this personal relationship? How can I bring this into my academic work?
And for me, that meant teaching an interim class, so the freedom of interim was that I could look at Grand Rapids and really think, similar to Dave, about the relationship of race and place.
As Calvin grad Willie Jennings says, theologian: How are ideas of race right themselves on the landscape? What does that look like? How do we inscribe whiteness and a sort of colonial mentality on the land itself? Part of that I've been really privileged to reach out to other local native leaders, including the Grand River Band of Ottawa. So this land is all council of three fires land. Anishnebek land, but it's particularly also the home of the Grand River Band of Odawa.
Current tribal chair Ron Yob. So one of the privileges of talking with Ron Yob as the tribal chair of the Grand River Band of Odawa is walking alongside him and listening to him talk about their ongoing struggle to get federal recognition.
So you know there are more than 500 federally recognized tribes in the United States. More than a dozen in Michigan. But the Grand River Band of Odawa, the Ottawa, are not recognized, right? So we have a neighborhood and mostly white neighborhood in town here called Ottawa Hills. We have a high school, mostly much more diverse high school called Ottawa Hills, but the local descendants of the Odawa tribe that was in the Grand River basin, the River Valley, is not recognized by our government because they can't prove it using government documents. They've been appealing this since 1994 and reading through the letters that the BIA sends back to them is a heartbreaking exercise in the brutality of bureaucracy. It's a 50-page document saying, you know, there's not a title page on this, or you're missing the author on this, so we can't, we can't go forward. Or this letter from 1952 is illegible, therefore your file is incomplete and we will not consider your application. So, it really brought home to me that this is ongoing history, right?
One of the big problems that we talked about with Native Americans is invisibility, that we pretend as if this is a historical thing exclusively and not an ongoing exercise in white supremacy, which it is. So being in relationship with Ron watching the health disparities that my wife is working with at the tribal clinic at HPP, has really brought home how current this is and how much Calvin, which as Dave said, exists in this watershed, also exists on land occupied still by thousands of the descendants of the people who have lived here for thousands of years, and we're in almost no relationship with them. We know nothing about their struggles. We haven't come alongside their fights for justice. That's been sort of one of my ongoing connections to this issue.
Penny: Will, I wonder if you can introduce yourself a little and tell us how you come to this.
Will: My take on this starts about 10 years ago on a class trip that I took as a student at Messiah College. A class trip to New Zealand. Much like what Gail was saying through this trip. We had a chance to visit with three different Maoris and spend some time knowing them, hearing their stories.
Being able to learn part of their history and their story. I never really thought about many of these issues prior to that, and I remember that being a profoundly moving experience for me to hear the stories of our friends over in New Zealand. And I had the privilege of 10 years later being able to take an interim class as well back to visit with our friends. So kind of a circle back to these relationships that I started that I started with ten years ago. A lot of my thoughts really have started to come out of those experiences. I'm still very young in thinking about this.
When we were over there in New Zealand, I think probably one of the things that stood out to me most was walking around Auckland, which is a fairly urban area on the North Island, New Zealand. Listening to one of our friends tell the stories that you only get from somebody who's experienced them. Talking about how he would constantly struggle with town councils regarding potential building projects on their burial power, the burial sites took us to the local group’s Waka Canoe, which was in a cage as he would put it walled off with bars across it with a key that didn't belong to him, belonged to the town government.
He told a story of an offshore island that was that is now shared and the conservation issues are now shared between the Department of Conservation and the local iwi. But talking about the struggle to simply have a say in what is done on that island.
At the end of the night he challenged my class and then he challenged the students that I had the privilege to walk with over there this past year to think about what these issues may look like back home. He says, how many of you can….He asked us how many of you can talk about these issues. How many of you can talk about land issues in your own context? And that was a really convicting question.
My journey to this topic really came out of those discussions and recognizing that I have a lot of learning to do myself. So I think that was an acknowledgment that I made as part of these classes and something that I hope to continue to build my awareness of.
That's I think where I'm at right now, much like Dave and Gail. I'm very much interested in conservation biology as well, and, being a conservation biologists, thinking about relationships that we share with the land and seeing our really a contrast thing – a Series of relationships and worldviews that are built in the context of the surrounding landscape. To build a sense of place, if you will.
Actually I was moved in part by Dave's Book Beyond Stewardship, thinking about some of these issues, really about how we view our calls to be stewards of the creation and how a largely white Judeo-Christian worldview has been tied very closely too, and probably in many cases on, unfortunately two ideas of dominion-ism, which runs counter-cultural to my friends over in New Zealand. So, really you know, both from a professional standpoint, thinking about how this intersects with my own professional work, but also personally thinking about learning and building and walking humbly to recognize that I have a lot of work to do here, and so that I think that's what has brought me to the Table.
Penny: So, our focus today is on land acknowledgement, and perhaps some of us have been at an event, either virtually or in person, where someone has read a land acknowledgement at the beginning of the event, but some of us may kind of be new to the topic. I'm wondering if you could help our listeners understand what land acknowledgement is and isn't.
Joe: I think land acknowledgement in the United States is an acknowledgement of the truth. And so often we lie about our history. And land acknowledgement is a beginning to tell a truth. When I learned the history of Michigan. There were native people here and then they weren't here. And then the Dutch came, and the Dutch were my people and we settled, and we planted tulips and built a great economy, and it was wonderful.
That ignores the brutality, the domination. The systematic indoctrination assimilation and finally forced removal at gunpoint to Oklahoma of the people who lived here. Land acknowledgement is a beginning to say this was their land and we took it by force in order to exercise misguided theology's of Dominion in the service of global capitalism. Right? To serve God and money in the way that we wanted to.
Lewis Cass was the 2nd territorial Governor of Michigan and then Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson. He was one of the architects of the Indian Removal Act, and he's from Michigan. There's a street couple blocks from where I'm sitting right now, named after him. There's a county named after him. There's a school in Detroit named after him. Lewis Cass believed that God had destined white men to take this land and do something with it. And that Native Americans were inferior and needed to be removed. So land acknowledgement says, “Look, we did this.” Now at the same time, as lots of other folks have pointed out, land acknowledgement ought to be naming a truth and trying to build a relationship that has to be accompanied by action. Faith without works is dead, and I think you could say the same thing about land acknowledgements. Naming the truth is meaningless; it's virtue signaling. It doesn't get you anywhere, if you're not committing to do something with that truth.
You know Jesus says the truth will set you free, and I think one of the exciting parts for me about having land ecologists and watershed people here is what would that freedom look like if we told the truth about this land about how we stole it, for which purposes we deforested the entire state to build fortunes for furniture barons to build fancy houses in Heritage Hill. But what would it begin to look like to recapture what this place was when it was the land of the people who we acknowledge in land acknowledgement? There's, I think, there's some really exciting freedom on the other side of that journey, but it starts with telling the uncomfortable truth.
Will: Land acknowledgement statements, at least to me. Or only a start. It's part of building awareness. It's part of recognizing previous injustices, but it cannot be the end. And I really appreciate, Joe, your discussion about the link with the land as a conservation biologist.
One of the things that moved me to this field…. Growing up as a child's romantic view of the US National Park system, I love the National Park system. I love the concept of wilderness, but, in many cases, it was that same concept of wilderness that led to the appropriation of native and Indigenous Lands. The Fortress Model of conservation was built to be exclusionary, and it's has ties to systemic injustices. And the National Park system was used as a tool to alienate native people from their land not only here but in other countries, as well. The Yellowstone model of conservation was really exported out to the world. And in many colonial societies, ranging from New Zealand to South Africa, it was used as a tool to alienate and isolate.
And, you know, just as a story from that, I remember sitting with another one of my friends over in New Zealand this time talking about one of their sacred mountains that they share that they hare ancestry, come from. And he was talking about this: his mountain is right at the Foothills Tongariro National Park, which was inspired by the Yellowstone system talking about how it took him up until the mid 2000s to have a say of any small say, and a small say at that, in some of the things that go on in that mountain. That mountain is one of the most popular footpaths in New Zealand and was told me a few years ago had no outdoor restrooms, so it was from there, rom all points of view, desecrated in many ways, and they had to fight tooth and nail to remember to protect that mountain from.
Those types of impacts and just to allow just allow space for that. So personally for me at you know, building off maybe my introduction earlier. I have been moved in part by/ to explore these ideas in part by the relationships that my academic discipline, my professional discipline have had in these historic ongoing ways that that folks, that people have been isolated from their ancestral lands.
Dave: Something I would like to add about a land acknowledgement statement. I think it's it's so important that it is something that's public. And it's something that's consistent. And so we put it out there for other people who are not part of our community to hear. And we make ourselves vulnerable for others to recognize: Wait a second, you said that. But you're acting this way or that's all you're doing is you're saying something, but I don't see any changes.
So in a way by making it public and by being consistent with it, we are allowing ourselves to be held accountable by others, and I think that's really, really important for a Community that talks a lot about justice. I think it's really important to do more than just talk, and I feel like a land acknowledgement statement indicates to others, like Joe said, that we are a community that wants to tell the truth about the history of our school, about the history of this place, his part of the creation in which we reside. And we would like others to help us learn that truth an and hold us to it and hold us and hold us accountable when our telling of our story is not so truthful and needs correction. So, I think, having a land acknowledgement statement is something that needs to be public and it needs to be consistently conveyed.
Gail: And I think part of it is acknowledging the past. Admitting, honestly, our complicity in what has happened. But I think we also have to be very clear about our complicity in the present. We are not being transformed and shaped. And learning and listening from indigenous people much yet. And we need to be. We need to be willing to submit ourselves to learn more an.
And it's not just in the past where the problems have happened, they're still continuing today. Native Americans have in essence been erased from most peoples, even consciousness and so. And it's not just in the past, it's very current too, and I think that's something that's been said already. So I I think that's all part of why land acknowledgement statement is a really important first step.
Joe: To just piggyback off what Gail said there, I know that there have been a few times when we've had several native students at once on campus, notably in 2015. But the vast majority of our native students have been selfless. United States have been Navajo because of our colonial history with boarding schools there. I'm unsure whether we have ever had a native student from Michigan as a student at Calvin, and I do know that it was 80 years before we had any native graduate from Calvin, so Calvin began in 1876 as a seminary for Dutch men, and it was in 1956 when our first Native graduate graduated, who is Navajo, right? It had come through Rehobeth, the boarding school affiliated with our denomination.
So I think that's something that a land development can prompt you to look into. So how are we relating to these people to the Council 3 fires, nations to the Potawatomi in Ojibwe, in the Odawa. Have we ever had a student from any of those nations attend Calvin. Why not? There are, as far as I know, no scholarships specifically for native students at Calvin. What could we do about that, right?
I've mentioned a few people that I'm excited. We're having this conversation because it's 2021 and that's the bicentennial of the treaty that took the land that Calvin is on. So, the Treaty of Chicago in 1821, which Lewis Cass “negotiated” for some payments, a blacksmith and a teacher on the Grand River took everything from the Grand River South to the border with Indiana and Illinois ither than a couple small reservations of 3/4 square miles.
So it's been 200 years. We're just starting to talk about it, and that's going to prompt us to start talking about some other things, I hope as we move forward.
Dave: I think what a land acknowledgement statement can do is it can help us to start thinking about what is part of my own behavior, my own mentality today that reflects my colonial heritage.
A colonist is someone who goes to a new place and imposes their presence on that new place and Europeans did this all over the world. Every place they went, they imposed their presence. None of them were trying to figure out how can we fit in to these new places. They were going to be British, they were going to be Spanish, they were going to be French in a new place. And I think we have to realize that much of the way we think about our own selves, that our own place is today a reflection of that original colonial mentality. We're still imposing our presence.
So it's so much better to ask how can my presence better fit this place?
Penny: So when land acknowledgement becomes a community practice. It seems like it's really an opportunity both to look back to recognize and speak truth about what has happened as well as think about the present and what is happening and how indigenous voices are still sort of ignored or silenced. And then, as was just mentioned, it's also an opportunity to look forward and how we can be agents of renewal and work for justice where there has been in the past, injustice and highlight and raise up voices and listening to those voices. Where in the past there has been erasure or ignorance of those voices?
Thank you for joining us for an introduction to land acknowledgement. If you want to dive a little deeper, listen to the second podcast on this topic. Whose wisdom do you trust? How to go about land acknowledgements?
If you appreciated today's episode, you might be interested in the book Beyond Stewardship, New Approaches to Creation care.
This book is edited by one of today's guests Dave Warner and his colleague Matt Hume. The chapters are written by different scholars from diverse disciplines who share a deep passion for a flourishing creation. With interesting stories and expertise from across the campus, this book offers keen insights on how to understand human presence in the broader creation and how to live better in the places we inhabit.
Beyond Stewardship is available through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the Calvin campus store.
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The views expressed in this podcast, reflect individual perspectives and experiences and are not necessarily policies or positions of Calvin University.