Land Awknowledgement

I am living on Anishinabek territory, which is one nation of many that have been here since before Canada. Toronto is within the original territories of the Mississaugas of The Credit, the Anishinabe, the Haudenasaunee, the Chippewa, and the Wendat peoples. The name “Toronto” originates from the Mohawk word “Tkaronto” which means, “the place in the water where the trees are standing”  or “where there are trees in the water."

 

I want to acknowledge that English, as it is today, lacks the language and names for proper specific colonizers, settlers, history narrators, and people who did settle here but who did not contribute to colonialization. Here, I am thinking about Black people and Chinese people, but there are still more complex identities that have yet to be seen by the larger picture of colonialization because of diaspora and/or seeking refuge. The fact that we lack the langue for different types of settlers and have over-languaged Indigenous identities, lands and treaties make talking and learning about our so-called Candian history very complicated and is itself a way of erasing Indigenous histories.

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It is our individual and collective responsibility to learn about the land now called Toronto or Canada (and anything in between) and how these names came to be - many of which are actually appropriations of Indigenous land knowledge to begin with.