by Oppositional Conversations Editorial Board
There's something unsettling about Land Acknowledgements.
To acknowledge means, at its foundation, to demonstrate one's knowledge of something. It is an activity of acknowledging or giving the recognition that is due a thing. Making a land acknowledgement stirs memory, recalls harm, excavates uncomfortable feelings, and raises challenging questions.
Is a Land Acknowledgement an incantation meant to reference a yearned for but unaccomplished re-enchantment of ground whose alienated commodified reification as property produced the expenditures making the public occasion of the speaker and audience’s co-presence possible?
In this issue, we want to acknowledge complex relationships to land. Land has meant so much within and outside the academy. Humanities, social sciences, and the “hard” sciences have something to say about it and the many knowledges and agenda that constitute its material realities and associations. As the selections in this issue suggest, rootedness, rootlessness, land as property, land as homeland, land’s gendering, land as possession, land as dispossession, land as reparations and repair, land as destroyer, stewarding land, owning land, land as memory, land as amnesia, land as resource, and land as scarcity are just some of the themes that grow from reflections on Land and its meanings.
Land as meaning, as mythology, as immaterial concept over which people have long been willing “to fight to the death.” To gain access, to control, to inventory its resources. Land as the real, as that which has been walked and worked and tilled as a means for direct producers to reproduce themselves, their families, and their communities since “time out of mind.” Land as something else entirely, as living subject, as legible and illegible witness from the beginning of time (from before even the tremors of tectonic plates) through to our current moment and into futures that have yet to emerge. Land writ large, contemplated from points of view that include determinations beyond the limits of “humans” as discretionary actors and in relation to everyday political action.
We hope this issue will move readers to dig deeply into the loam of what it means to acknowledge land and be moved by the encounter.
—The Editors
O. Hugo Benavides
Zine Magubane
Maurice Stevens
Cally L. Waite