As graduate students, we acknowledge that we each have unique relationships to the land on which we reside and may identify as a settler, uninvited guest, Indigenous to the Land, or other. We encourage individual students to personally situate themselves and continuously reflect on their relation to the Lands on which they reside and work.

The EGSA commits to an ongoing and collective (re)visioning process within our organization. Specifically, we would like to acknowledge our indigenizing process as we take up our co-responsibility of enacting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and the SFU Aboriginal Reconciliation Council report.

However, due to structures of genocide that target all Indigenous People, and specifically target Indigenous women and girls,  trans, and two-spirit people, these lands today are illegally occupied and claimed by British Columbia & Canada. We further recognise that there would be no Faculty of Education at SFU, and indeed no higher education as we know it in Canada without the original and ongoing colonization of Indigenous people and lands, brought on through government policies that were never officially accepted and established together with Indigenous people, just as there would be no Canada. As graduate student educators and future educators, we actively advocate and support the Faculty’s ongoing education initiatives, including our suggestion to create a mandatory course on decolonization in the Canadian and British Columbian context, available to all graduate students in the Faculty of Education.

We want to thank the GSS and SFPIRG for their help in writing this land acknowledgement.