Beyond the Land Acknowledgement

EB
by Eilish Brennan11 views·Updated Nov 8, 2020
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  1. Hello, everyone.
  2. My name is Alice Brennan.
  3. I'm a 19 year old white woman, and I come
  4. from a small town of about 8000 people in southwestern
  5. Ontario called The Stool.
  6. This is the community I'll be focusing on today.
  7. I grew up very sheltered from diversity.
  8. Everyone enlisted well, looked like me, talked like me and
  9. dressed like me.
  10. Our community events were often centered around agriculture, which drew
  11. in a crowd of farmers from surrounding areas.
  12. We almost never celebrate diversity.
  13. It wasn't until coming to Queens in Kingston in general
  14. that I had heard a land acknowledgment my high school
  15. never gave them.
  16. And nor did my elementary school or anywhere in my
  17. small town for that fact.
  18. After doing some research of my own, I learned that
  19. the stool is situated on on the Shanab land.
  20. But I can tell you, from firsthand experience living in
  21. this town my entire life, there has been no recognition
  22. of that in any way, shape or form.
  23. Yeah, it wasn't until eighth grade that I learned her
  24. understood anything about indigenous peoples.
  25. In eighth grade, my teacher invited a local indigenous man
  26. named Christian Dennis.
  27. He came into our classroom to speak about his culture,
  28. his artwork in his survival of the sixties scoop.
  29. He's a local artist.
  30. This day still stands to be one of my favorite
  31. memories from elementary school.
  32. I came to learn that Christian is an outstanding community
  33. member and was involved in a number of ways.
  34. Up until very recently, everything I knew about indigenous culture
  35. had come from Christian.
  36. He was the person that told me everything I knew
  37. he had done interviews with local news stations.
  38. But his experience surviving the sixties scoop and growing up
  39. as a racialized citizen in a very white town here
  40. have included one of the many interviews Christian has done
  41. about the sixties scoop in growing up as an indigenous
  42. man in a small town.