Relationship to the Land – Land Acknowledgements in Digital Spaces

Our engagements, exchanges, knowledge makership, and mobilizations within this course reflect the intercorporeal and inextricable entanglements between land, spirit, mind, and bodies (this includes beings and non-beings, humans and non-humans alike). We understand land as kin (Simpson, 2017) and come to our political labours from new and old learnings, grounded in insights of Indigenous onto-epistemology and worldviews.

TMU is a settlement in Tkarontoa—a Mohawk word and the original denomination of what is colonially known now as Toronto, meaning “the place in the water where the trees are standing”—on the unceded, expropriated, and stolen lands of the Mississauga’s of the Credit, the Haudenasaune, the Anishinaabe and the Chippewa. Tkaronto is in the ‘Dish With One Spoon Territory’. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land.

We also name that the computers and technology that allow us to traverse space, to exchange time and temperatures virtually is fed and fueled by Congolese blood in the DRC and the exploited labour of our Third World siblings.

In this space, we ask how our disability justice access activationist work changes in its actional, praxistical iterations when we understand the disablement of al-ard, or the Earth, as bound to the disablement of the earth’s peoples and bodyminds. We refuse to merely name Indigenous sovereignty. We choose instead to orient ourselves and the architectures of care we build towards it, both here on Turtle Island and across Indigenous lands this world over. As disabled Palestinian and Southern justice poet Rasha Abdilhadi reminds us: “What happens here and there are one.” We are all but a hologram of (land) struggle everywhere.

All our work towards Otherwise is rendered null and void unless and until the land makes a safe return to the stewardships of its original caretakers: our moments and movements and makings and meetings with madness and its outcroppings should act accordingly

Landback, first, foremost and forevermore.