Place is everything: remembering responsibilities between and beyond land acknowledgments

Abstract

ABSTRACT Land acknowledgment statements in higher education have become pervasive performative gestures that serve to relieve settler guilt and manage public memory. This article details the distribution of stolen Indigenous lands to universities, and identifies problematics of university land acknowledgments. I offer the concept of “impoverished memory” to discuss the insufficient, duplicative means by which universities acknowledge land, and “felt memory” to Indigenize critical memory politics of land, peoples, and nonhumans. To fight against the machines of colonialism within universities and beyond, I offer specific scyborgian anti- and decolonial actions that are specific to place and for Indigenous futures.