I went to a theater show about six months ago. Just before the show started, the director came out and did a “land acknowledgement” — talking about how the part in which the free show was being performed had once been the land of a local Native American tribe. It was the first time I had seen such a “land acknowledgement”, something that’s become increasingly common in progressive and activist communities. As I attended this week’s MLK Day of Service this week at Rutgers-Camden, I thought back to that performance, and I thought we need to be intentional about acknowledging whose land we are on, and the history of that land if this is going to work.
Here’s the Laurier Students’ Public Interest Research Group’s description of a land acknowledgement:
WHAT IS A LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT?
A Land Acknowledgement is a formal statement that recognizes the unique and enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.
WHY DO WE RECOGNIZE THE LAND?
To recognize the land is an expression of gratitude and appreciation to those whose territory you reside on, and a way of honouring the Indigenous people who have been living and working on the land from time immemorial. It is important to understand the long standing history that has brought you to reside on the land, and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land acknowledgements do not exist in a past tense, or historical context: colonialism is a current ongoing process, and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation. It is also work noting that acknowledging the land is Indigenous protocol.
My experience at the MLK Day of Service was bookended by a similar observation — that in order to do our work today, we need to acknowledge the impact of colonialism upon our neighbors.
It seemed particularly pertinent as I road the bus to my Day of Service sight, and I heard students talking about how they wanted to help and introduce themselves to their new neighbors as “giving back.”
It seemed even more pertinent when I heard some of our Camden neighbors — on a tour of Rutgers facilities — talk about how as youths they had been asked for ID on campus, then told they were not allowed to be here. Or when I heard them discussing the “insult” of framing a Day of Service as helping, when the University was using eminent domain to take away Camden properties from locals.
And this, too often, is the struggle with days of service — they are oriented around a colonialistic understanding of help. We (the people with resources) are helping you (the people without them). It’s an approach that ignores the harm universities have done in the community around them, the political challenges that our neighbors face as a result of the university, and the ways the university has truly benefitted from being in this community.
As we walked into the campus center with our Camden neighbors, I couldn’t help but think about how Roy Jones had protested with 6 other students of color by locking themselves in that building to insist the campus integrate, hire faculty of color, and even start an Urban Studies program (the one I now teach in). It was the support of local community activists that helped those students organize, and helped leverage that activism into those victories.
I couldn’t help but note that as we discussed the ways community members can access our library system (progress!), that the very name of the building (Paul Robeson) came from those same protests.
I think folks have done a wonderful job pushing the university to open up it’s borders and give access to it’s facilities and that days of service can be a useful tool to get needed work done. But to frame that as “help” or “service” ignores the many ways that our neighbors have strengthened our campus community, whether through fighting injustices when there wasn’t the stomach to do so on campus, or maintaining homes and businesses so that the university has the opportunity to grow, or simply by welcoming our students to their neighborhoods as more and more students live on campus.
In other words, let’s start doing the right thing not because we are helping, but because we appreciate our neighbors for the many ways they’ve welcomed us. And let’s make sure when we do days of service, civic engagement, or service-learning that we share that history, so that our students don’t come away thinking they’ve saved the world — they come away thinking they’ve begun to build something with their neighbors.
(And for those who are curious, here’s some history I found of the “Delaware Indians” and the Unalachtigo tribe in Southern New Jersey)
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