How To Decolonize Your Mind

Or Land Acknowledgements as a Practice

Reading time: About 17 minutes.

This piece is available in a ‘zine alongside a never-before shared piece of fiction and a colouring page. You can order a copy through my website.

Step One: Bear Witness

One day you attend a dharma talk by a revered teacher in Tibetan Buddhism. The talk, hosted on the campus of a prominent university on the colonized West Coast of Turtle Island, opens with a land acknowledgement led by members of five of the dozens of Nations indigenous to this coast.

The land acknowledgement is extensive. Each Nation has their own ceremony, which they have combined into an elaborate and beautiful expression of welcoming and gratitude. There are dances, drumming, songs, and thanksgiving as it was intended before it was appropriated for the purposes of colonial propaganda.

One of the Nation representatives brings forth a ceremonial blanket as a gift to the guest speaker. They wrap his shoulder in this blanket, over the robes he wears as a renunciate, a person indigenous to a land he has never been to. He was born in a refugee camp because his home land is an occupied state. The person wrapping him in the blanket is doing so as someone born into a Nation unrecognised by the white dominated occupation of this land.

The ceremony extends for twenty, thirty, forty minutes.

A group of women and children come onto the stage to share a story through dance, a celebration of rivers and the abundance of fish and the relationship of people to the planet. You watch the stage with joy in your heart as the smallest of the dancers, a child no more than three, breaks from the formation. This is obviously not part of the choreography, as several of the adults on the stage laugh in surprise, and several of the older children scowl that this young one has taken the spotlight and isn’t following the rules.

 The honoured guest, off to one side of the stage, seated cross-legged in a chair, claps delightedly. The smallest child goes to him, and he helps her onto his lap. She shows him the feather she holds and he shows her his mala beads.

Around you, the audience grows increasingly restless as the dancers stomp and turn and move as a river might. The polite silence tinged with impatience is something you’ve been aware of since about fifteen minutes into the ceremony.

The dancers finish and an elder comes to collect the small child. The tension of the audience shifts. Surely, they seem to express, this is it now. It’s been almost an hour. Surely, now we will hear the talk.

But no.

The ceremony continues. More offerings of gratitude are given—for the air we breathe, for the sun, for the ocean, for the flowers blooming on the campus grounds surrounding the building where we are all seated. Grounds that were once stewarded by the ancestors of those on stage. Grounds that have been stolen, claimed, by your ancestors, who believed it could be possessed and made it so.

The restlessness of the audience is palpable. You are not immune to it. Your first thought is, “This is taking forever.” Your second thoughts are, “This is beautiful. This is important. This is powerful. This is something you are fortunate and blessed to witness and be part of. This is a reclamation. Pay attention.”

After nearly an hour and a half, the ceremony finishes. The talk begins.

Later, you will remember surprisingly little of the talk. What will stick with you is the ceremony, the sacred acknowledgement of what sustains, supports, and nourishes all of us.

Step Two: Avoid the Urge to Appropriate

Five people sit in a circle in a small shrine room at a local Buddhist centre. You initiated this gathering. Together, with the aide of a guide made for white people, you will scrutinize all the incremental ways you participate in and uphold white supremacy without ever donning a white hood or making a Nazi salute.

You open this gathering and awkwardly say you ought to be doing a land acknowledgement. You say this because since that Dharma talk you attended last year, Land Acknowledgements have become a Thing. (Although they are never like that first one you witnessed.) What happens now are acknowledgements offered by rote in a droning tone by a fellow white person.

The script starts like this: “We are on the unceded/stolen/occupied lands of the *Insert Indigenous Nation/Tribe Name Here* people.” They then usually have a few more sentences about acknowledging the past and maybe, sometimes, a statement about how such-and-such Nation/Tribe still exists. Sometimes.

They do not speak of the land itself. 

They do not speak of having a relationship to the land. 

They do not speak of land and people as interrelated and our interdependent survival.

Because this gathering is specifically about addressing whiteness as white people, you are honest about your discomfort in doing a land acknowledgement. You admit that you do not know the names of the local Tribes or Nations, and that you wouldn’t want to just memorise some words to say without really understanding why you are saying them.

Another member of the group tentatively raises her hand and asks if she can share her thoughts on the subject. You ask her to please do. She says it’s good to be hesitant to do something like a land acknowledgement just because it seems like that’s what people in “woke” circles are doing. She points out that we shouldn’t just do it because everyone else is doing it. She says it is always worth asking why something is being done and to really look into it before doing it yourself.

You are grateful to her for this.

It speaks to your practice, to the wisdom of the lineage you feel part of: Do not believe anything I have said. Test it, as you would a piece of gold¹. Apply it to your own life. Consider it for yourself first, rather than ignorantly taking it on without having a relationship to it.

Later, you think about the reckless impulse of goodness, which is to say, the way we will grab onto doing whatever will make us appear as “good” people without understanding why it makes us “good”. It is an impulse that happens without thoughtful consideration. An act of doing without an understanding of purpose.

You have witnessed it with these dry land acknowledgements that are so different to the celebratory one you first had the honour to watch. You have seen it in yourself when you used to think saying “There is only one race, the human race” was very clever because a lot of people you thought of as clever were saying the same thing. You will witness it again later when thousands of people post black squares to their social media accounts in what is purported as a show of solidarity, but actually masks and hides and restricts information needed for organizing resistance.

You set yourself an intention: You will not do a land acknowledgement unless you feel it as a practice. 

You have made this kind of commitment before. You did not get a set of Mala beads for yourself until you understood them as a tool of spiritual technology. You refused to hang up Tibetan prayer flags for years until you felt a personal sense of spiritual reverence for them². You understand that too much of Buddhism practiced by white people is thinly veiled cultural appropriation. You will only do a land acknowledgement if it carries the same transformative power as reciting the Heart Sutra or chanting Om Mane Padme Hum.

Step Three: Integrate

You are standing in a circle with about fifty other humans. The sky is perfectly, infinitely blue and the sun is hot and bright on your head. You have been standing here for nearly an hour. Sweat trickles down your rib cage from your armpit. Your hands are clammy, especially the one in which you are holding a small pinch of tobacco.

The tobacco came from a pouch now in the hands of the man leading you all in a Thanksgiving Address from the Haudenosaunee AKA Six Nations³ people. He is doing an abridged version, which he explained when you began, and still, it is a long time to be standing under the heat of the desert sun. And you are in the desert. You reflect on this as he offers thanks to the elements, the plants, the animals, all the beings that give us life and make this Earth so incredible.

As a child, you pictured deserts as barren places. You knew they had life because you watched nature videos the way your peers consumed music videos and Saturday morning cartoons. It never occurred to you the things that could and would grow in a desert. The land on which this Buddhist community sits is a testimony to the abundance of a desert. Every day you have been harvesting from a plum tree and splitting apricots to dry them for the winter. Hundreds of sunflowers line the paths criss-crossing the grounds. Towering stalks of corn provide shelter to squash and a vertical path for beans to climb.⁴

The man leading the ceremony brings it to a close. Together, you and all those in the circle chant:
And now our minds are one.

One of your favourite Buddhist teachings, from Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, is:
There is multiplicity in Oneness.

The ceremony ends. The retreat ends. You return home.

A few months later you attend a talk by a Black teacher born in North America. He puts to words something you have been mulling over since you heard the same wisdom echoed from one practice into another:
Buddhism is an Earth-based religion.

One of your favourite stories from the life of the Buddha is from the day of his enlightenment. He had been meditating under the Bodhi Tree, committed to waking up, when Mara began throwing all sorts of challenges his way. Nothing works to break the Buddha’s resolve and finally, frustrated, Mara goes for undermining the Buddha’s commitment.

He asks the Buddha what the point is? There is no audience. No one cares. No one is following him. He has nothing to show for all this effort and no one to show it to.

The Buddha reaches one hand down, touching fingertips to Earth.

In the mythical version of this, the Earth manifests as a being. You picture her as human in shape but made to look like a tree, covered in moss and blooms and thick, rich green leaves. You picture her dancing like Dakini dance, lightly stepping on the ground from which she emerged, dirt clinging to roots dangling from the soles of her feet⁵. She says to Mara that she is the Buddha’s witness. She has been here, holding this person, feeling his feet and watching his commitment to alleviate suffering for all beings. She has supported him and not only that, he is of the Earth. He is as much her as she is him.

Bhumisparsha, this gesture is called. The Earth Touching Mudra.

You remind yourself that nature isn’t “out there.” You are a precious child of the Universe, made of stars, of the same stuff as the rest of the Earth. Dualism—the false concept of separation in an inseparable, interconnected Universe—serves colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy.

Once you read that saying ‘white supremacy’ is less accurate than saying ‘white dominance’ because it isn’t just about superiority, but also control. Christianity teaches dominion over nature. Thus, colonialism is about dominion over land as justified by Christian doctrine. As you question what you have been told about colonialist superiority, you cannot help but think and feel and relate differently to the Earth.

You begin to feel a difference in your heart and mind. You are beginning to understand that to acknowledge the land is not to  simply name some Tribes. You are beginning to understand that acknowledging the land is to know you are of the land. All of you. Every single being on the planet.

Step Four: Transform

Now that land acknowledgements are common, so too are critiques, commentaries, and criticisms about what they are, how they ought to be done, by whom and in what circumstances. You chew and digest what you hear, test it against your own sense of reason and understanding, and apply what makes sense in your gut and heart.

You now know the name of several local Indigenous Nations and make a monthly contribution to one. You don’t always name them when you do a land acknowledgement, and you don’t do a land acknowledgement every time you facilitate. When you do, it is grounded in your relationship to the land and your anti-racist de-colonial commitment to waking up. It is informed by where you are at that moment. It is a continuation and extension of the practice you have made of it.

It is a practice. An ongoing, incremental shift towards awakening.

The changes you are aware of are sometimes subtle and sometimes profound.

Subtly: Nature is not ‘out there’. It is not removed from, apart from, separate from yourself or anyone. Even trying to put words to this feels inadequate.

Profoundly: Land ownership abhors you. This is significant. When you and your Unicorn bought a house in 2017, your focus was on being together somewhere. You thought about stability and a home. You did not once think about what it meant to possess part of the planet we all collectively rely on. You did not think about what it meant to acknowledge this as theft. You did not consider the lineage of colonizers and settlers that you were stepping into. You were simply a millennial who had truly believed owning a home was never a possibility, who desperately wanted to be in the same place as your person.

Now you think very differently. You begin to realize that Land Back does not necessarily mean giving land back, (although, sometimes it does) but understanding that you cannot give nor take what is universally needed for survival. Land Back is not about the land being returned, but about people returning to the land—understanding our responsibility to it, to one another, to our collective survival and capacity to thrive.

You spend a whole year reading Braiding Sweetgrass. You carry with yourself many questions: Does my garden love me? What is it to be a steward of the land? What is it to acknowledge that where your home is built is land that used to be collectively lived on, harvested from, and cared for? How do you integrate this understanding into your day-to-day? How do you reconcile living under a system you abhor, benefiting from that system, and wanting to build a different, non-oppressive system?

Navigating the complexity of this is a never-ending process. There are so many factors. Stable housing matters. As long as we don't build our society on the basis that it is our collective responsibility to make sure everyone is housed, it is no small thing to have shelter. It is no small thing to have the option to buy, rather than being forced to rent, lining the pockets of a Lord.⁶

You cannot single-handedly dismantle this system, nor opt out of it. But you can challenge it, and experiment with different systems. You cultivate a relationship with both the house and the land that supposedly “belongs” to you.

You appreciate the home for the shelter it offers. The walls and windows that protect you from the wind and rain and snow that far too many of your neighbours do not have protection from.

During an at-home retreat, you clean your home with intentionality—thinking of it not as an investment for financial gain, but as a precious structure as worthy of reverence as a Buddhist temple. 

Here: this is where the lighting is perfect for creating art and the view is perfect for inspiring your writing.  

Here: a room in which you bathe, defecate, and generally care for your physical self. There is running water and a receptacle to carry away waste. 

Here: you have soft things to sit on, places of comfort and warmth, where you can curl up with your person and enjoy the safety and ease of having a home. 

You offer thanks to this home as you have seen gratitude offered in ceremony to Buddhas, to Bodhisattvas, to teachers, to shrines.

In the garden, you begin to understand the reciprocal relationship of your hands in the dirt and the things that you plant there. You build garden boxes. You ensure no chemicals that would kill pollinators or indigenous plants are used. You think of the parameter of the garden not as something to be protected from thieves, but something to be protected from greed, fear, and scarcity mindset. 

The garden thrives. It offers up gifts for the labour you put into it, grateful for the water you provided through the hottest summer on record. You harvest thousands of raspberries, hundreds of beans and cucumbers, dozens of tomatoes and tomatillos, five of the fattest parsnips you have ever seen, and four gorgeous, plump squashes.

You gift what you couldn’t possibly eat yourself to neighbours, and every time they try to offer money, you say no. 

You say, “We have so much.” 

You say, “We are happy to share this.” 

You say, “You do not owe us anything.”

You understand that nourishment comes in many forms, beyond just what you eat. You plant flowers to nourish your sense of smell, and to delight the eye. So many flowers. You spread wildflower seeds everywhere you can. You get bulb plants and figure out the best places to put them so they will thrive. You ensure mowers do not cut away the patches of clover that bloom in the lawn. You offer your labour to ensure that every season, the bees and wasps and butterflies and hummingbirds and hoverflies have their choice of blooms, that they will give the gift of their labour to all that this garden grows.

Yes, you realise, the garden loves you as you love it.

Step Five: Awaken, always. Repeat, repeat, repeat

If someone were to ask what a land acknowledgement means to you, you would say this:
A land acknowledgement is about how we understand our relationship to where we live. 

Land acknowledgement is about the ground beneath our feet. The land on which our home is built should we be so lucky to have a home.

Land acknowledgement is the relationship we have with the rivers, with the mountains, with the setting sun. It is how we recognize ourselves in relationship to and part of nature, not in possession of and apart from it.

Land acknowledgement is connecting with our deepest Indigeneity, knowing the soft animal of our body, and listening when it tells us where and how we belong.

Land acknowledgement is not mystical or romantic but a practical and spiritual understanding of our place in the web of everything.

Land acknowledgement is an anti-racist practice that challenges the paternalistic narrative of white settler colonialism that teaches the lie that white colonialists were more advanced than the Indigenous Nations they actively worked to destroy through genocide.

Land acknowledgement is standing in solidarity with land defenders and making choices that lead to divesting from fossil fuels.

Land acknowledgement is understanding land ownership as a violation of our shared home and the need we all have for clean water, breathable air, and an abundant harvest.

Land acknowledgement is seeing how we share labour to ensure everyone is sheltered, everyone is fed, everyone has access to water, to medical care, to community.

Land acknowledgement is gratitude for the way the land supports us and the abundance it offers. It’s appreciation for the air we breathe and the plants who make it breathable. It’s care and love for the animals we share the land with.

Land acknowledgement is understanding that there are many ways for humans to live in relationship to the land, both past and present, and understanding that it is a relationship necessary for our collective survival.

Land acknowledgement is an acknowledgement of what is needed for our collective liberation. That we are not separate from the Earth and the Earth is not separate from us.

1. This is to paraphrase a quote that has no true attribution.

2. In fact, you didn’t even know they were called Tibetan Prayer Flags. You just thought of them as those colourful flags white hippies hang on their balconies. You didn’t even know they had anything to do with the schools of Buddhism you were practicing in until you met your Unicorn and they explained their significance. Even then, you were hesitant to hang them. Even now, you are careful when you do.

3. The Six Nations are the Seneca, Onandaga, Mohawk, Cayuga, Tuscarora and Oneida. They live along the northeastern coast of Turtle Island, were some of the first people to come into contact with European colonizers, and they continue to resist colonialism and fight for their sovereignty.

4. “Three Sisters” you have learned this is called—an Indigenous way of planting and cultivating crops that remains superior to anything the invading Europeans conceived of. This relationship of reciprocity lands in your heart. You will take it home and grow your own gardens of sisters, which will thrive.

5. Yes, you intend to make this piece of art one day.

6. Not that a mortgage isn’t making someone ultra-wealthy even wealthier.

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Immense gratitude to Rowen for all their editing support with this piece!

If you would like to know the original stewards of the land on which you live, you can search using: https://native-land.ca/

You can purchase a ‘zine featuring this piece and a short fiction story through my website.

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