Land acknowledgements are an increasingly common presence in public spaces around the Valley. They can usually be seen on plaques in parks or around the ASU campus.
The wording varies, but their goal, ostensibly, is to acknowledge the indigenous communities of our region. However, Eunique Yazzie thinks land acknowledgements have more potential.
Yazzie is an indigenous artist and designer, and is also the co-founder of an organization called Cahokia PHX, which bills itself as an "indigenous-led platform for creative placekeeping."
She recently made a short film called "This Land is Your Land," and it proposes a version of land acknowledgement that embraces a much more expansive interpretation of the "land acknowledgement" concept. The Show recently spoke to Yazzie more about it.
Full conversation
EUNIQUE YAZZIE: When I think of the word acknowledgment, I see it as more of a healing journey. Acknowledging something is the smallest step that starts you on your journey. But if you cannot see right, the wrongs or the things that have happened in history that harmed people but you're just doing it performative, there's a big disconnect on what the acknowledgement is supposed to be.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes, there's something kind of odd about the tone of a lot of land acknowledgements, which is that they imply that the presence of native peoples as a phenomenon from the past. You know, if we think about the the kind of boilerplate land acknowledgement language that we see a lot of it is, you know, this land once belonged to or we acknowledge the previous presence of these people in this place.
YAZZIE: It's done from the perspective of anthropology. So when you think of how indigenous peoples or native peoples have been recorded in history, it's more from the perspective of a European stepping on and just observing or, you know, just noting certain things and that's where those land acknowledgements are coming from.
DINGMAN: Yes. Whereas you use language like if I may quote, we acknowledge today with a grateful presence, the surrounding air's vital breath, the languages, culture and ways of life, born from the deserts, canyons, mountain ranges and Valleys. And as I was listening to that and watching the film, it struck me that in this land acknowledgment you are addressing the land.
YAZZIE: Yes.
DINGMAN: Why is that a meaningful difference for you?
YAZZIE: And I'm going to start crying in this one because the land is so important to indigenous people. We are so connected that our DNA and our knowledge systems, our ways of life are so connected to the places that we live. Me being Navajo Diné from the Navajo Nation, I was taught by my grandmother, by my parents, by my community, what it means to be Navajo and it was connected to my clanship and my clanship, if you translate my clans into English, they are basically a description of people coming from land. And for us, it's not two separate things.
We are the same thing, we live and breathe with each other and we take care of each other. I have such love for the land in a way that I love myself and that if things are harming me in my environment, it is also harmful to the land. And so it's a very interconnectedness and it's an understanding that I've been raised with.
DINGMAN: Absolutely, it makes me think. And again, I hadn't thought about this until we started speaking that the tone of again, a lot of these sort of boilerplate land acknowledgments is the language of difference. It is essentially greetings fellow Westerner, please remember that different people quote unquote, used to live here.
Which is completely different than what you're describing, which is this holistic circular connected version of what the land and the people are. So, is it fair to say that you envision a different form of land acknowledgment if that's something that we're going to do in public spaces.
YAZZIE: Yes, I do. I feel like our land acknowledgments as a modern day people need to change to include creative people. And I really feel like through the arts, through creative power, that's where you're really going to connect somebody and make that connection in their heart.
A lot of the projects that I do have the framework of understanding that we are living in a present time, but always looking for our future and leaning on the stories of our ancestors from the past.
DINGMAN: So I'm guessing that the film would be an example of one of those projects. Tell me about some of the other projects that you feel like are in service of this.
YAZZIE: Yeah. So we did a projection show, I want to say two years ago that incorporated a vortex. And what I did is we hired, I want to say three, four artists to paint a large mural that is now on Roosevelt in Central. It was a black and white mural and the vision for it was that this black and white mural was going to be the shadowing and the stark contrast of our realities.
Then what I did was layer it with a projection show and I created a video that basically told the story of our existence from the moment the Big Bang happened. And we all became the sons and daughters of a star. And it went through all the transitions of indigenous people being colonized, to us relearning our history, to us creating place now to different protests that happened in the past.
And then it went into the future. Like, what are we going to do when we sit around our fires? What are we going to do when we sit together? What are we going to imagine what else is out there?
DINGMAN: Yeah, unique. I have to say, you know, we started our conversation talking about land acknowledgments and plaques. But what you're talking about is this multimedia experiential rumination on how one might be coming to stand at this particular spot in what we currently call Phoenix. You know what I mean? Like it's so much bigger. Sorry, I'm just very moved by the project you described. Am I capturing at all what your aim with it is?
YAZZIE: Yes, you are. At the end of the day, what is being elevated and resurfaced again, goes back to that healing journey. It goes back to that moment in time when you decide that you need to make different choices in how you acknowledge people and the things around you and how you're connected to it all.
DINGMAN: If you're comfortable saying, you know, when we were talking about your community's relationship to the land, you said it, it brings up a lot of emotion for you. Could you say just from your own experience, what emotions come up when you see a plaque at a park or you know, one of these other versions of land acknowledgment that we've been talking about, does it elicit any sort of emotional response for you?
YAZZIE: No. OK. That's a simple answer.
DINGMAN: And therein lies, the problem.
YAZZIE: And the reasoning is because I know that whoever wrote that was probably not indigenous and whoever created the idea of it was probably not indigenous. So what right do they have of acknowledging the land? We are the acknowledgers of that land and indigenous people, we operate through a cyclical format and we operate in a reciprocal process. And when you think about land acknowledgments and where they're done, they're holding ground, they're holding space somewhere, but it's not necessarily giving anything back.
