Land Reflection

We acknowledge that we are on Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Attiwonderonk (Neutral), Haudenosaunee, Mississauga, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation lands. This land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, which was an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabek to share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

We think about how we can be better covenant and treaty partners and how we can better support landback advocates.

As settlers to these lands, when our parents/some of us arrived on Turtle Island years ago, the permission for us to stay, live, and work on this land did not come from the people to whom these lands belonged; in contrast, the permission came from the settler colonial institutions, complicit in stealing the land and genocide against its original inhabitants.

Many of our elders’/our migration from those lands in the Philippines on the other hand, has to be understood within the context of the effects of 333 years of Spanish colonialism, 48 years of American rule, 2 years of British occupation, and 3 years of Japanese occupation.

There is no single migration story for those with Philippine heritage here. However, many women and their families in Canada could exercise their political and economic freedoms and affordances because some women like the Filipinas and racialized women carried the burden of domestic work such as lived-in caregivers, PSWs, and cleaners. It does not help that the Philippine socio-political-economic system has yet to recover from the inequities wrought by histories, as well as global and domestic social forces. But it also bears mentioning that many of our kin, have a long history of fighting colonialism and oppression, and advancing social justice then and now.

This forms part of our unlearning, that we cannot have any conversations about social justice without reflecting on our entanglements and complicity in these settler colonial projects, in the PH and in Turtle Island.

Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands and ways of life.