LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We honor the Lenape and other Indigenous caretakers of these lands and waters, the elders who lived here before, the Indigenous today, and the generations to come.
We’d like to acknowledge that we are located in the unceded territory of the Munsee Lenape in an area now known as New York City. The island of Manahahtaan is part of Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland.
Encompassing a unity of land, people, living, and nonliving things within its territory, Lenapehoking extends across what is today New York City and New Jersey, including portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Centuries of occupation by European settlers, displacement, forced migration, and genocide of the original peoples, along with intense development, have erased almost any sign of the Lenape’s long presence on the land. Today, New York City is a diverse city, with over 200 languages spoken, and a large population of Indigenous Peoples from a number of tribal nations. Yet Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes members of three federally recognized nations in Oklahoma and Wisconsin, and two in Ontario, Canada. (Home in Lenapehoking, 2020).
In order to make this an active land acknowledgement we have donated to the Lenape Center in NYC, which was established in 2009 with the mission of continuing Lenapehoking through community, culture, and the arts. The Lenape Center is based in Manhattan and led by Lenape elders. The Lenape Center has created programs, exhibitions, workshops, performances, symposia, land acknowledgments, and ceremonies to continue the Lenape presence in Manhattan and they are working towards the creation of a physical culture center.
Find out whose land you are on at native-land.ca
Please join us in supporting, and asking institutions you are affiliated with, to support indigenous peoples wherever you are. Linked here are just a few of the many Indigenous-led organizations that you can support, but of course feel free to do your own research to find organizations in your area.
The following meditation is from Professor Hannah Holleman.
Like everywhere else in the US, this place has a long and ongoing history that we should always strive to better understand, and that we should remember collectively when we gather like this.
I want to ask us to really bring our awareness to the fact that we're making use as we meet today of items that are only available to us as a result of the extraction and commodification of the metals and minerals necessary, for example, to manufacture computers; of trees from forests to make furniture; of the unsustainable exploitation of soils for our food and the fibers that we're wearing; and of the extraction of fossil fuel deposits for the petroleum products or plastic.
In almost everything else around us these days, we are, as we sit in our classrooms, in our offices, always surrounded by nature that's come to us from somewhere where somebody else lives and works. Most of the plastics around us will wind up in some landfill or in our waters and will eventually break down and end up in our bodies and the bodies of other living beings with many consequences.
The computers we're using right now may very possibly wind up in landfills in other countries or in so-called recycling centers, AKA, you know, dumps, where they cause a lot of toxic pollution and where people, including kids, work in unsafe conditions to take them apart and attempt to salvage bits and pieces that might be sold.
So everywhere that these things come from is, or was, habitat for species, including in some places, humans, that's now altered indefinitely, if not permanently, so that we may, most likely in a very temporary fashion in wealthy countries, make use of them. And so someone may profit from selling them to us and to our institutions.
For these items, we're also dependent upon the labor of those who are not sitting today as comfortably as we are. Rather they work in the mines and in factories to assemble these creature comforts for us or rather the things that are now viewed as essential to our everyday lives and to our work.
They're laboring in unhealthy and often toxic conditions and they're generally not offered what's unfortunately the luxury, rather than the right, of access to educational institutions. So they don't go home to well furnished rooms. And they're rarely asked by people in power about what they know or what they want for their communities and their future. Or how they might think about resolving the ecological and social crises that they confront so directly.
However, without them, and without the resources taken from some place someone may have once called home, we wouldn't be here today, such as we are.
So I highlight these points not to be a drag or prevent us from getting to the book, but because I think they lead to some of the critical questions, the best and most reflective scholars and teachers might ask about the purpose of our work in this historical moment. And perhaps what we might want to accomplish through opportunities to meet like this today.
So, even as we sit here, we're living one of the core insights sociologists have developed from the 1800s till today -- which is that we are embedded in a set of social and ecological relations that are shaped by inequalities in power and wealth by violent histories and ongoing practices of racialized expropriation and exploitation and dispossession that are part and parcel of the history of capitalist development.
We can see this today when political and business elites don't seem to flinch as they impose policies that are well-documented to inflict harm on communities and ecosystems. And we can see it in the fact that indigenous peoples defending their lands are still murdered with impunity, especially when they get in the way of extractive forestry, mining and other so-called development projects.