Personal Land Acknowledgement, October 2023
Hello everyone, 안녕하세요 여러분 (ahn-nyeong-ha-say-yo yeo-reo-bune), I am a newcomer to these lands we call North America, or as many Indigenous peoples call it, Turtle Island. I originally come from 서울, 대한민국 (Seoul, South Korea) which is across the great ocean that is west of Turtle Island. My people use the tiger as a symbol of our ancestral peninsula, surrounded by three seas. Today, I am very fortunate and privileged to call both of these places my homes. But unfortunately, both of my homes share the pain of colonialism.
My first home, Korea, was colonized by the neighbouring nation of Japan, in the first half of the twentieth century. In this land acknowledgement today, I reflect on how those Japanese colonizers forced my people to look like them, to speak like them, and to think like them, just like how the European colonizers did the same to the Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. And no matter how hard we tried to assimilate and to learn the colonizers’ ways, they would never treat us like their own and never share all of the privileges they stole from the land. Thankfully in Korea, my ancestors were liberated from their Japanese colonizers with the help of many allies around the world, including Canada and the United States. But sadly, my second home on Turtle Island remains very much colonized still.
I acknowledge that Turtle Island is a much bigger land than Tiger Peninsula. So more specifically, I will acknowledge that I live on Treaty Six Territory, in Amiskwaciy Was-ka-hi-kan, a Cree name for Edmonton, meaning Beaver Hills House.
Today, I am grateful to be able to live on these lands as a settler, where centuries of colonialism have paved the land, both literally and figuratively, for newcomers like me to live in comfort and to benefit from the continuing colonial exploitation of these Indigenous lands and peoples. As I acknowledge this, I am conflicted and ashamed. I am a hypocrite, who celebrates and champions liberation from colonialism in Korea, while in Canada I live in complacency of the same colonialism of the Indigenous peoples. I feel frustrated that I must communicate to you all in English, a colonial language from Europe, instead of being able to communicate in Cree, the largest Indigenous language group where I live on Treaty 6 Territory. I resent that we all dress in “professional” clothing that is derived from a Eurocentric colonial cultural tradition. Ultimately, my heart aches that too many of us, including myself, have been culturally indoctrinated by colonialism to automatically believe that the Eurocentric “Canadian” ways of knowing are the true ways of these lands, because it is not. The more I study and learn about the First Peoples of Canada, the more I uncover and reveal the made-up colonial structures that dominate and permeate throughout Canadian society today. As a teacher, I acknowledge that educational institutions and public schools, including charter schools in Alberta, are a major culprit in the continuing perpetuation of Eurocentric Canadian colonial norms and ways of being in our society.