Blog Entry:
Hadih, Sage Lacerte Sahdnee. Te be snachalya injan Lekwungen keloh. Sigh gunna luchshiboo injan yinkak Carrier dene keloh. My name is Sage Lacerte and I am a Carrier woman from the Lake Babine nation. I am a transnational Indigenous feminist that lives and operates internationally on Turtle Island between the Lake Babine nation and the WSANEC, Songhees, and Esquimalt nations. Throughout my studies at the University of Victoria in the gender studies program, I have come to understand that the institution has conditioned students to announce our positionality in regard to the Indigenous unceded lands that we occupy (via territory acknowledgements) then proceed to operate within colonial spaces that perpetuate the states dominance over these same Indigenous nations. When addressing the territory that white and non-white settlers occupy, this must not be considered an arbitrary task to be ticked off a checklist, but a signification that you have now become an international migrant on the territory of that particular nation and must behave accordingly. Therefore, this is not a territory acknowledgement but an assertion of Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty.
Rationale:
When negotiating what transnational feminism means, it is absolutely crucial to consider the modes of transnational feminism that we as students engage with every single day. Indigenous feminisms, territory acknowledgments, and the reconceptualization what “internationalism” looks like on Turtle Island is a great place to start when looking to better understand our own role as occupants on the territories that have been shared by the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSANEC nations since time immemorial. These are important considerations to make at a local and individual level for all students who work and live outside of their home territories. This blog works to invoke transnational and international perspectives while centering Indigenous epistemologies, pedagogy, and ways of knowing and being as a key pillar in understanding how students occupy space while attending university.
Keywords: Territory Acknowledgement, Indigenous feminism, Gender Studies, positionality, colonial dominance, Indigenous nationhood, sovereignty, internationalism
Author: Sage Lacerte
You raise an important point. Acknowledging indigenous territory has become a standardized routine. Institutions like the University of Victoria are comfortable acknowledging the ‘traditional heritage’ of the land, but not in claiming the reality that it is still currently unceded land. Personally, I only recently reflected that as a transnational migrant I participate in and benefit from colonial structure. Your blog post is an eloquent and thoughtful challenge to the legacies of colonialism. It reminded me of the Indigenous scholars Aikau, Arvin, Goeman, and Morgensen who in their 2015 round table raise the importance of honouring the value of heritage and family that are built in relation to the land.
Though the territorial acknowledgement is insufficient and weak, I am…
Thank you for this blog entry Sage! This is a great post to introduce folks to the way in which transnational feminism intersects with indigenous feminisms. As well, for students to begin to integrate their acknowledgement of territory into everyday praxis. In the acknowledging of territory as sovereign nations, we can integrate this into our ways of knowing, and in doing so theorize a different future for settlers and indigenous folks. One of the important ways of doing this must be settlers ceding power, and centering the lives and experience of Indigenous nations and people, across Turtle Island. Acknowledgement without actions is often worthless.