For Graduate students By Graduate students

Territory Acknowledgement

The TGSA respectfully acknowledges that we are on the treaty and traditional territory of the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg. We offer our gratitude to the First Peoples for their care for, and teachings about, our earth and our relations. May we honour those teachings.We acknowledge that we gather in Nogojiwanong, a place known in Anishinaabemowin as “the place at the end of the rapids.” This land has been stewarded since time immemorial by the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg, whose governance systems, knowledge traditions, and relationships with the land continue to shape and sustain this territory.

This is the traditional territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg, covered by Treaty 20 (1818) and later by the Williams Treaties (1923). These treaties were not gifts of land, but rather agreements that Indigenous nations entered into with the Crown with the understanding of mutual respect, coexistence, and shared responsibilities. These agreements have been repeatedly violated by settler governments through land dispossession, resource extraction, and the imposition of systems that undermine Indigenous sovereignty and lifeways.

The 1923 Williams Treaties were signed under extreme duress, following decades of encroachment and exploitation. These treaties extinguished Indigenous land rights across a vast area of southern Ontario without fair compensation, and without upholding the spirit and intent of the original nation-to-nation relationships. It wasn’t until 2018 that Canada and Ontario formally acknowledged the harms caused by these treaties and agreed to compensatory measures—though justice remains an ongoing process.

Universities, including those on these lands, have played an active role in the settler colonial project. As institutions founded within and for the colonial state, universities have long served as tools of assimilation and dispossession: through research practices that extracted Indigenous knowledge without consent; through curricula that erased Indigenous histories; and through policies that excluded Indigenous students, scholars, and ways of knowing.

We must recognize that higher education in Canada is built on stolen land and enabled by the displacement of Indigenous peoples. The very foundations of our institutions—land grants, endowments, research funding—have often relied upon the expropriation of Indigenous territories and the erasure of Indigenous governance systems.

Today, as we learn and work on these lands, we are called to move beyond acknowledgment toward material restitution and decolonization. This includes centering Indigenous sovereignty, supporting language and culture revitalization, affirming the inherent rights of Indigenous nations, and upholding their jurisdiction over their territories.

We express our gratitude to the Michi Saagiig peoples for their enduring stewardship and care of this land, and we commit to walking in right relation, guided by accountability, reciprocity, and deep respect.

Throughout your time at Trent, you will hear these words said quite often. Since it was founded, Trent University has incorporated Indigenous culture and ways of learning into its curricular and extra-curricular programming, becoming an internationally recognized leader in Reconciliation and cooperative Indigenous Relations. The Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies, founded in 2017, provides a number of resources for students to begin their journey in understanding our relationship with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous knowledge. Students are encouraged to learn about why we offer our gratitude to the First Nations for the land that we occupy.