Land Acknowledgement, Kamloops, British Columbia

This creative expression project was researched, written, and completed on the unceded traditional territory of the Secwépemc People. Thompson Rivers University sits on Secwépemc land, and I am grateful for the ongoing generosity of this territory, which has held me, my work, and my learning for more than two decades.

The Secwépemc are a sovereign people with deep and living connections to the lands, waters, and places of the Interior Plateau. Their stewardship of this land precedes and exceeds the institution that now occupies it. I write with awareness that academic precarity, the subject of this inquiry, has its own colonial genealogy, and that the institutional violence I name in this project exists within a broader structure of settler colonialism that continues to dispossess Indigenous peoples of land, language, and livelihood.

I acknowledge this land as an ethical commitment rather than a formality: to remain awake to the relationship between the rights I claim and the rights that continue to be denied.

Land Acknowledgement, Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico

The thirty days of inquiry at the heart of this creative expression project were lived on the ancestral territory of the Cochimí People, whose presence in the Baja California peninsula extends back thousands of years. Loreto, known as Conchó to the Monqui people who inhabited this territory, was a place of gathering, ceremony, fishing, and living long before it became a colonial mission town or a research site.

The Cochimí were among the peoples most devastated by Spanish missionization in the eighteenth century. The Jesuit missions established at Loreto beginning in 1697 brought epidemic disease, forced settlement, and the systematic suppression of Cochimí language and cultural practice. The colonial violence of that history is present; it is held in the landscape I walked, the water I sat beside, and the silence I found restorative.

I came to this land as a settler visitor seeking rest and recovery. I hold the irony clearly that I found healing in a place where so much was taken. I offer this acknowledgement with the understanding that my thirty days by the sea were made possible by a history I inherited without earning, a history I am unable to undo, only name, hold honestly, and carry forward with care.

Gracias a esta tierra. Thank you to this land.