We acknowledge the land and waters where we are living and working today, the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.
However, we also want to acknowledge the contradictions embedded in performing the land acknowledgement. Particularly, we are interested in posing the question of what a Land Acknowledgement can do when the settler colonial project of erasure is ongoing and emanating from this land?
So, we acknowledge that land acknowledgements are themselves part of the ongoing occupation, with a rhetorical tendency to sanitize the violences of occupation and genocide. We acknowledge that when we speak with the language available to us, this rejects the deep multiplicity of the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations each with their long and proud histories of relationships with the land.
So too, with this acknowledgement we want to honor the resilience of occupied peoples worldwide, resisting settler colonialism and the deep erasure of their multiplicity that comes along with modernist codification of difference.
In the wake of historical and ongoing genocides, we want to acknowledge that the people are still here, the land and waters are still here, and their resilience is immutable.