If you read my previous article on my experience at Maine Coast Semester at Chewonki, you would know that I spent four months on the coast of Maine this past spring semester. Not only did I learn about the natural history and ecology of the land that I was studying on, but I also learned about the history of the land and who was there before me. During orientation week, we engaged in a bootcamp acknowledging the land that we were going to use during the semester that was once inhabited by indigenous peoples. Once I returned to Parker, I realized that we have not had a land acknowledgment in the time that I have been there.
As an elite, college-prep institution that reaps so much economical benefit, it is slightly shameful that Parker doesn’t have a land acknowledgment. Parker benefits from the resources the land provides and it’s dishonoring the indigenous inhabitants by not having a land acknowledgment. This land once did not belong to Francis W. Parker School. To my knowledge, no indigenous people attend Parker, however honoring that this was once the land of the indigenous peoples should be important to the community as a whole.
There are quite a few reasons as to why land acknowledgments are controversial. One being that they fail to accurately represent the traumas of the indigenous peoples who were forcibly taken off of their land. Many people feel uncomfortable recognizing the violent actions that the colonizers performed on the indigenous peoples and tend to ignore that it happened at all. While it is understandable that this is not a light topic, it must be appropriately addressed. Currently, the Parker community is not recognizing the hardships that the indigenous peoples went through when their land was taken from them, with the exception of the 11th grade humanities curriculums. However, the Parker community, as of right now, is completely blindsided as to which indigenous tribes used the land that is now Parker. Continuing to deny the fact that this was how the indigenous peoples were treated is undermining their existence and fails to observe their land.
Land acknowledgment can also easily become a performative stunt without much substance or genuity. In these cases, land acknowledgments can end up harming the community and indigenous tribes rather than respecting them. An easy way around this is to make the land acknowledgment as direct and factual as possible with very little personal bias. The less opinion-based to the land acknowledgment, the less controversial it will be.
An effective land acknowledgment addresses all of these issues with a direct mention of the indigenous tribe that were the original stewards of the land. This could sound like, “We gather here today to honor and acknowledge the land on which we are standing on is the unceded territory of the [Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo] People.” An ideal land acknowledgment is meant to raise awareness on what it truly means to inhabit the land of indigenous peoples and what steps can be taken towards reconciliation.
The best and more effective approach to implement a land acknowledgment into the Parker community is to devote a Morning Exercise to one. This way there will be an ample amount of time to address all that is needed during the land acknowledgment, while also not having to be repetitive and annoying to students. The ignorance of the indigenous peoples occupying the land before us is horrendous. We can change this narrative one step at a time, beginning with a land acknowledgment.
