In Acknowledgement of Settler Complicity

We are settlers on indigenous land. America is NOT a land of immigrants. It is a land that has been stolen, occupied, and lied about. Even as queer, immigrant, people of color. What this means is that in order for us to benefit from anything that has to do with the United States means a complicity in a settler project designed to alienate Native and Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands.

A simple land acknowledgment is not enough—it’s what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call “a settler move to innocence.” In their article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” they define this move as follows:

The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. (Tuck & Yang 1)

The University of Colorado, Boulder in their land acknowledgement states:

 CU Boulder, founded the same year Colorado became a state in 1876, recognizes that it sits on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Núu-agha-tʉvʉ pʉ̱ (Ute), Hinóno’éí (Arapahoe) and Tséstho’e (Cheyenne) peoples and many other Native American nations.

It remains essential to read about the histories of the land written by the People of the land instead of the settler accounts of who they are and what their histories are. Follow the links Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute to learn more about the tribes of the area from their websites.

To learn more about the Native Nations in your area look at this map: native-land.ca

With this history comes a denial, a desire for the settler to make right the wrongs that allow us to maintain access to privilege, to capital, to land ownership, so we developed the land acknowledgment to absolve ourselves from guilt. To own here means someone cannot, a tenet truth of the American settler capitalist machine. But there is no absolving of guilt without a returning of land, despite our migration stories.

My family came to North America with a desire to escape British racism and economic and political oppression drove them to leave Guyana, South America where we lived for generations, descendants of (racialized, trafficked) indentured laborers. Even there we settled Indigenous lands of the Lokono (Arawak), Warao, and Kalina.

As such, as a professor of poetry at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I am complicit in the ongoing removal and disenfranchisement of Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute, and other Native nations. With this acknowledgement I hope to show a deeper engagement with the Peoples of this land through my tools as a poet and how as a perpetual student I seek to learn about the People through their own writings, their own histories, and their own voices.

These are some of the poets who belong to this land:

Tanaya Winder: “Love Lessons in a Time of Settler Colonialism”, “Being” and “And I wonder where you are”

M.S. RedCherries: “playing america in spring” and “finding tomorrow”

Sy Hoahwah: “Church for the Disliked” and “Pineola”

CooXooEii Black: “Some Notes on Vision” and “On Mindfulness”

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Writing Prompt Based on Tanaya Winder’s “Lessons in a Time of Settler Colonialism”

We at the University of Colorado Boulder are located on the traditional homelands and territories of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute and other Native nations who were and are still forcibly removed from this land. As the poet Tanaya Winder states in her moving poem “Love Lessons in a Time of Settler Colonialism,” they find themselves “alive and breathing,” which evidences her and her community’s survival despite the history and presence of settler colonialism and settler attitudes.

Whose land did you grow up? Who are the people of the earth that sustained you? Write a land acknowledgement of the People. Find a poem written by a poet from the particular place you are from, then write a writing prompt based on the poem that you find. Make your land acknowledgement meaningful.

For this prompt, write a nine stanza poem that regards a particularity of your own familial history. Each stanza should consist of two lines, the first line should be longer than the second line.

Your poem must also include:

1.     Written in couplets

2.     Mention of the wind

3.     Use word “breath” or “breathing”—any form of it

4.     An epigraph from the poet from your land acknowledgement

5.     At least three semicolons

6.     At least one em dash

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Writing Prompt based on M.S. RedCherries’s “finding tomorrow”

In Mother M.S. Redcherries writes epistles to her mother, from whom she is estranged. The estrangement is not her mother’s fault, but rather the result of poverty. The speaker and the mother did not maintain communication until the speaker was fifteen, though they thought of each other all of the time. The speaker of Mother imagines an inferiority of a person who had connection with their mother from the beginning, unbroken, and often writes about what life would have been like had she not been sent away. There is tenderness, forgiveness, and grief that emerge simultaneously throughout the collection.

These epistles in part II of the book take the form of poetry and lyric prose. Her relationship with her mother is fraught as she was put up for adoption when she was young, but not young enough to not know what was happening.

In an epistolary poem that blends lyric prose, write a letter/poem to someone who you are estranged from and with whom you are seeking relationship healing.

In your writing include one or more of the following:

1.     Explicitly named locations

2.     A nuanced grief and understanding magnanimity for the person being addressed

3.     Ending with an address of the person and a question (this last line or two should be in italics)

4.     Zero punctuation

5.     Direct quotes