I would like to acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Stó:lo and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. It is with gratitude that I am here as a visitor on these traditional territories, where we live and on which our work is based.

As a class and as a community, let’s work together to think about what decolonization means in our collective and individual contexts and how we are all implicated in colonial structures. Media is complicated. Technology has been used to control and oppress. It has also been used to amplify and support marginalized voices. Let’s use this time and space to learn from each other and attend to the systems of power we live with and work within.

I choose to participate in an institution understanding that the institution is not divisible from the wider world, and that the classroom is not merely a place to acquire skills but a place to practice values and methods of collaboration that allow us to become better artists, better students, better educators, and maybe better humans.

I support the anti-racist work being done by students and faculty across the university and, in this course, I hope to disrupt the exclusion and gate-keeping that is common in sound and media arts communities.

For all of us, becoming Indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

~ from Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I invite you to add your own acknowledgements, reflections, and questions below. The idea is that this acknowledgement page is an active, organic, and open space for articulating and navigating the systems of power and privilege that we are working with/in.