A Harder Acknowledgement
Most land acknowledgements stop at just naming the treaties, territories, and peoples. They also typically conclude with some words about how grateful we are that we get to work, live, and play on this same land. Don’t get me wrong. It is something to say out loud. But it is pretty safe… and I’d wonder if it has become meaningless over the past decade or more of hearing them offered almost like “The Lord’s Prayer” for every occasion.
Perhaps many of you have been taught through Indigenous Cultural Competency Trainings that a better way - Land Acknowledgements 2.0 - is to make them personal. So don’t simply list off the identity label of the land you are on but instead speak about your own engagement with the land itself, your ancestors, where you come from, and what this acknowledgement means to you. It certainly allows for individuals to do more personal reflection and people listen differently to these.
Inspired by the book, Talk Treaty To Me which I explore more fully in another post, I wondered what it would take to write an acknowledgement that named genocide and ecocide honestly, and locally. So I thought I’d invite you on my own journey as to what that might look like for the land upon which I work and play - Knox College, in the city of Toronto. As they say in math class, show your work - so I’m showing you my work as an invitation for you to do your own.
I want to say that I’m still learning here… and I likely will get some things wrong along the way. Check your sources… and be open to being corrected.
I sense this project works best by exploring four movements. I’m grateful to the City of Toronto, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, and the site: A Treaty Guide for Torontonians: Talking Treaties Collective as sources for much of my research. You will need to search the sites appropriate to your location.
Movement One: What This Place Was
Before Toronto was York, it was a gathering place, and had been for thousands of years. Tkaronto is the historic Indigenous root word for Toronto, meaning "where there are trees standing in the water". The Toronto Carrying Place Trail linked Lake Ontario to the upper Great Lakes and was among the most significant trade and travel route in northeastern North America. Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and later the Mississaugas of the Credit lived here, governed here, farmed and fished and traded here.
Which is to say: this was not empty wilderness waiting to become a city. It was a populated, governed, cultivated homeland to many.
Movement Two: What Happened
In the 1600s, epidemics brought by Europeans killed something close to half of the Indigenous population of what is now southern Ontario. The disease itself was not an intentional policy. What followed it was. Colonial powers moved into the devastation, and dispossession accelerated.
The Toronto Purchase. The 1787 agreement was so poorly documented and so contested that the Crown itself later conceded its deficiencies and sought a replacement in 1805, and then interpreted even that in ways that served settler interests and stripped Indigenous peoples access to lands that had sustained whole nations.
So rather than “we acknowledge that we are on Treaty 13 territory,” what if we asked: What does it mean that this city was built on a transaction whose legitimacy was in question before the ink was dry?
Movement Three: What Was Done To The Waters
Toronto's rivers were never scenery. The Don, the Humber, the Rouge, Garrison Creek, Taddle Creek and dozens of smaller streams were kin, corridors, food, and ceremony. The Don was straightened and channelized. Garrison and Taddle were buried and are now storm sewers under the university and the streetcar lines. The Ashbridges Bay marsh, one of the great wetlands of the lower Great Lakes, was filled. The Atlantic salmon are gone. The Carolinian forest and the tallgrass prairie are remnants. The wild rice, the passenger pigeons, the oak savannah, the beaver wetlands, the medicine plants. Gone.
And for Knox College and St. George Campus, the original natural ravine carved by Taddle Creek through campus can still be traced by Philosopher’s Walk. The university built Ziibiing, an outdoor Indigenous landscape installation on Hart House Green that traces and honours the buried waters of Taddle Creek.
This eradication wasn’t only an ecological matter. It was a treaty matter.
Treaty 14, the Head of the Lake agreement of 1806, preserved Mississauga fishing rights at the Credit River, at 12 Mile Creek, and at 16 Mile Creek. Treaties 22 and 23, in 1820, dealt with those same creek reserves. Named waters. Specific promises. In writing.
Go and look at those creeks now.
This is the kind of ecocide that needs to be acknowledged. Not just the loss of nature. The destruction of living relationships among peoples, waters, animals, plants, and places.
Movement Four: What Continues
An acknowledgement that ends in tragedy has told half the truth.
The Mississaugas of the Credit continue. Haudenosaunee peoples continue. Wendat descendants continue. The languages continue. The treaties continue, and so do our obligations under them.
And so does the unfinished business.
Land claims continue. The Toronto Purchase Claim was settled in 2010. And if we thought that it was all history we’d be wrong. The Mississaugas of the Credit filed their Rouge River Valley Tract Claim in 2015, and it reached final settlement only this past March 2026, in an agreement co-developed with Canada and Ontario.
Acknowledgements should not sound like a history lesson. They are living realities.
The wounds continue too, in residential school histories across Ontario, in the Sixties Scoop, in child welfare numbers that have not moved nearly enough, in the ongoing displacement of Indigenous people from land and community.
Toronto never hosted a residential school but Toronto is full of institutions that benefited from the policy that built them. Knox College among them.
If you want to try this for your ministry context:
Ground it in your watershed, not in general history. Find the creek that was buried under your parking lot. Find your treaty number and read the actual document. Learn which nations were here and which are here now, and get the names right. A simple search of treaties in Canada, provincial and municipal websites, and conservation authorities should get you the basics. Don’t forget to look up the Indigenous nations in your area as many of them have information about the treaties, their history, and land claims.
Don’t write this alone (like I just did!), and do not hand it off either. An acknowledgement of genocide written entirely by settlers about Indigenous peoples repeats the pattern it means to name. As is possible, reach out to an Indigenous nation where your ministry context is located. Ask if you might talk to someone about the history of the land and their peoples. Listen well.
End in responsibility, not in feeling. What action does this acknowledgement ask of this gathering?
Here’s my attempt at a different kind of acknowledgement:
Knox College, Toronto
We begin where we are.
Under this building there is older ground.
Before Toronto was York, this was Tkaronto,
a gathering place,
and it had been one for thousands of years.
The Carrying Place Trail ran from this lake
to the upper Great Lakes,
and along it travelled the Wendat,
and the Haudenosaunee,
and the Mississaugas of the Credit.
They farmed here. They fished here. They governed here.
This was not empty land waiting for a city.
It was somebody's home.
Then came the sickness that emptied the villages,
and the policies that moved into the emptiness.
The agreement called the Toronto Purchase
was contested from the day it was signed,
so poorly made that the Crown went back and tried again,
and still took more than was ever given.
We name what was done here to people.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it cultural genocide.
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
called it genocide.
We use their words this morning.
We do not soften them.
And we name what was done to the water.
Taddle Creek runs beneath our feet in a pipe.
Garrison Creek is a sewer.
The marsh at Ashbridges Bay was filled.
The salmon are gone from these rivers.
Treaty 14 promised the Mississaugas their fishing
at the Credit, at Twelve Mile Creek, at Sixteen Mile Creek.
Go and look at those creeks now.
That is ecocide.
It is not a separate sin from the first.
It is the same covenant broken twice.
But the story is not finished, and it is not past tense.
The Mississaugas of the Credit are here.
The Haudenosaunee are here.
Wendat descendants are here.
The languages are being spoken.
And the claims are still open.
The Rouge Valley Tract was settled only this spring.
The treaties continue.
Which means our obligations continue.
So we do not say these words to feel something and move on.
We say them to remember what we owe,
and to ask God for the courage to pay it.
To tell the truth.
To repair what can be repaired.
To keep the covenant we were handed.
To love the water as kin, because it is.
We are treaty people,
whether or not we have lived like it.
Teach us to live like it.
And a shorter version:
We meet on Tkaronto, a gathering place long before it was a city,
home to the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas of the Credit,
under an agreement contested from the day it was signed.
We name what was done here.
The Commission called it cultural genocide.
The National Inquiry called it genocide.
We name what was done to the water.
Taddle Creek runs beneath us in a pipe. The salmon are gone.
The fishing promised in Treaty 14
was promised at creeks we have since buried.
And we name what continues.
The nations are here. The claims are still open.
The treaties still bind us.
We are treaty people, whether or not we have lived like it.
Teach us to live like it.
One last word, connected to today’s Ministry Forum Podcast Episode.
What Living Like It - might look like
Today’s Ministry Forum podcast episode is a recast of a conversation about Urban Church Redevelopment and Indigenous Justice featuring Adrian Jacobs and friends. We recorded this for the reimagine Church Land Community Conference last year. The episode allows us to listen in on Indigenous and settler voices about what happens when churches redevelop or sell valuable urban property on traditional territories. The conversation moved through the wampum record: the Hiawatha belt, the Two Row of 1613, the Dish With One Spoon. Treaties, in other words, understood as relationships of sharing rather than transactions of sale.
And out of that came something plain enough to put in a budget line. We actually had Adrian Jacobs talk about it at our Creative Ways 2025 gathering… and featured a few congregations who had made the commitment in another podcast episode. It is congregations paying one percent of their annual income to Six Nations Polytechnic as a lease payment on the land they occupy. Fifty-four churches across eleven denominations have now joined in raising $23,000.
I am not suggesting every congregation do exactly that. But I am suggesting that "what does responsibility ask of us" has answers… and some are already being lived out by congregations just like yours. And I think many of us can“acknowledge” that when we put our money where our mouths are… it transforms our delight in being able to “work and play” into something transformative and long lasting for the peoples and the land itself.