Land Acknowledgements

Acknowledging the traditional lands of the Indigenous people on which you live, work, and study is an important way to begin an event or meeting and can be included as part of classroom activities and taught to students. Meaningful territory acknowledgements allow you to develop a closer and deeper relationship with not only the land but the traditional stewards and peoples whose territory on which you reside, work, live, and prosper.

Territory acknowledgements are designed as the very first step to reconciliation. What we do with the knowledge of whose traditional lands we are on is the next important step.  Should your institution have an approved territory acknowledgment please use that to open the session(s).

The authors and contributors who worked on this resource are located in Calgary, Alberta and they wish to acknowledge the following traditional, ancestral and unceded territories where they met online and worked together.

The City of Calgary encompasses a region that the Blackfoot tribes of Southern Alberta described as Moh’kinsstis, meaning ‘Elbow,’ in reference to its location at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers. Since time immemorial, this region was a traditional gathering place for the tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

These traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy today encompass the Indigenous people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta: the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuut’ina, the Stoney Nakoda First Nations and the Northwest Métis Homeland – Region 3.

We honour the traditional knowledge and ways of knowing and being of the peoples of these territories. Their knowledge has existed in these spaces since time immemorial.