“I don't believe in land acknowledgments. And I'm going to tell you why: because it's a Western ideal, the idea that somebody can own the land. It comes from Judeo Christian theology that somehow from a Western perspective, land is a commodity. It's something that can be owned by an individual or a company or a corporation, or a government. In our native way of thinking of things, we belong to the land. The land does not belong to us. In fact, if we think of the land as our mother, then we are the children of our mother. We cannot own our mother. It's something that we have come from, and we cannot own the land. And so, the idea of a land acknowledgement is a Western way of thinking about: this land belonged to them, now, it belongs to us. I think these should be called 'People Acknowledgments', because that's what we're really talking about. We're not talking about necessarily the land, we're talking about the people who are associated with the land. And that's my personal feeling about that. We belong to the land, we belong to her. It does not, or she does not, belong to us or any of you. That's the way I like to think about these things, and I know we call them ,Land Acknowledgments', but really, the gist of it is we're talking about the people that are that were here prior to the arrival of others.”