Providing a Land Acknowledgement
We are all grounded by diverse lands, each with their own names, histories, and relationships. Regardless of our location, we must reflect on the lands where we live and work as well as on the relationships that we have or aspire to build with them. Such reflection can provide a vital first step to the work of decolonization, work that must go hand in hand with the dismantling of entrenched racial inequities.
General Conference Land Acknowledgment Expectations
The 2022 ASHE Annual Conference will occupy the homelands of the Nuwu (Southern Paiute) in what is currently called Las Vegas, Nevada. Today, the Nuwu continue to traverse and steward the land of the greater Nevada area with other Indigenous communities, such as the Wa She Shu (Washoe), Numu (Northern Paiutes), and the Newe (Western Shoshone). We encourage everyone to learn and engage with the knowledges and experiences unique to the Nuwu. And to further critically reflect how local perspectives have relations to communities visiting from different regions of the world. The learning and engaging with local and community knowledges has the opportunity to strengthen conference proposals and intentions around traveling to the homelands of the Nuwu. As ASHE membership prepares intentions around traveling to Nuwu territory, we remind ASHE membership to consider how scholarship is a means to generate intentional conversations around local and community engagement. This year’s conference theme, “Humanizing Higher Education,” offers an additional lens to consider the following reflective questions:
- How have higher education structures and systems silenced and/or invited local and community voices?
- How can humanizing higher education extend our thinking beyond the “human” to be inclusive of land, sky, water, animals, other living entities, and all of creation?
- How can local and community engagements extend beyond the conference through sustaining practices or policies for those engaging in higher education?