Land Acknowledgement

I have been researching how to do a land acknowledgement for the last few months. One thing is clear: Boilerplate acknowledgements don’t mean much. A good land acknowledgement is the product of learning about the peoples who inhabited and cared for the land long before colonizers arrived.

I have a lot to learn. So much to learn that I can’t yet write a good land acknowledgement. But after some time spent pondering this, it seems appropriate to put at least something down – to give myself and any hiker reading this a starting point.

So this is not a good land acknowledgement. It is only a starting point.

The lands between Santa Fe and Taos have been held and cared for by Native peoples for millennia. I chuckle at hikers – and chuckle at myself – when we say “oh I did that (hiking from Santa Fe to Taos) before you. I did it in 2017.” Or “I did it in 2011.” That’s great: To everyone who’s ever hiked from Santa Fe to Taos, however approximately you did that, great.

But long before even Spanish colonization and later American settlement, the Ute traveled between Taos and areas that would be renamed Santa Fe. So did the Red Willow people of Taos Pueblo, and the people of Pecos Pueblo. The peoples of Picuris Pueblo, Tesuque Pueblo, Nambe Pueblo, The Pueblo of San Ildefonso, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, Pojoaque Pueblo, Ohkay Owingeh, and Santa Clara Pueblos all knew these mountains. Peoples from all of these nations, pueblos, and tribes still travel and have deep connection to these lands.

An incomplete list of resources

Because land acknowledgements are the product of learning and understanding, it seems appropriate to develop a list of resources for continuing education.

I’ve included links to the local Pueblos’ websites in the paragraph above. I encourage you to visit those sites.

This video about Taos Pueblo was helpful to me. Hat tip to the Continental Divide Trail Coalition, as I first found it on their YouTube channel.

If you are a reader, these two books are worth your time:

If you know of other resources that should be included on this page, please contact me.

For my own part

As it is my understanding that a land acknowledgement should include the speakers’ heritage, my ancestors are Irish and English. They hail from the area around Letterkenny in northern Ireland, among other places. I am an Air Force brat, born in Germany, and have moved around a lot since then. I do not have a hometown.

I can only hope some of you will understand if I tell you that my acknowledgement of the land is this: It is me. I am not whole without it. When I say “it is me” I am trying to describe a complex tangle of feelings and events that bridge psychology and the confusing, humbling nature of spiritual experience. The “me” I refer to is not the identity I hold in this culture. It is something on a soul level, a me whose edges are more permeable, an identity and an awareness that picks up when your mind stops chattering and you stop measuring time. I do not entirely know how to explain it. Part of my work on this trail is to make space to try to explain it.

I acknowledge the land in these ways:

  • I thank the water sources I drink from. I could not live more than a few days without them.
  • I thank the campsites where I’ve slept and then woken the next morning, unharmed.
  • I embrace silence and stillness.
  • I cherish the great mystery I talk to in the wild.
  • I am grateful to be able to explore these lands, and document them, and to be amazed by them again and again and again.