Juno News - May 11, 2026


College student calls out land acknowledgements on campus

Topics
land acknowledgements criticism academia
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Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

148.7

Word count

343

Sentence count

13


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I speak with my good friend and fellow Canadian, about her essay, "Land Acknowledgements: A Critique of the Canadian Land acknowledgement system." This essay is a critique of land acknowledgements in all facets of society, and the lack of criticism of them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Tell us about your essay and what got you interested in that particular topic.
00:00:04.520 My essay was essentially a critique of the current situation that we're in in Canada with making these land acknowledgements in sort of all facets of society.
00:00:16.760 And in certain cases, many people feel compelled to do so either by social mandate or by actual policy with the institution they work for.
00:00:25.160 so I wrote this essay while I was still in school in my final semester and what spurred me on to
00:00:33.020 write it was just the environment that I was in we were being instructed on land acknowledgements
00:00:38.780 but what we were being taught in the curriculum was that land acknowledgements were essentially
00:00:43.660 this unquestionable thing that surely we must only interpret in a positive way and a criticism
00:00:50.500 wasn't even on the table. It wasn't even suggested that we might think of criticizing the concept.
00:00:55.740 So I felt frustrated in that we were being led down a particular mode of thought.
00:01:01.020 Now, a lot of this is considered controversy, particularly amongst the woke academics out there.
00:01:07.360 They think you have no business, you know, questioning this sort of thing. Did you run
00:01:12.920 into much opposition from those quarters as far as your essay goes?
00:01:20.500 Um, luckily, the professor that was teaching the course was actually reasonable in the end.
00:01:28.180 I wouldn't have known that writing a critical essay in that class because the rubric of the
00:01:33.660 assignment would only break down and provide marks for writing a positive interpretation of
00:01:39.920 land acknowledgement. So I wrote an essay similar to what I ended up submitting. And the professor
00:01:46.240 actually gave me a hundred percent and uh you know emailed me with like an explanation and stuff um
00:01:52.080 so i was lucky but in an academia today you don't know if you're gonna get lucky um you might have
00:01:58.400 a professor that um doesn't take kindly to you pushing back against their ideas that they've kind
00:02:04.400 of um they hold is like almost sacred in a way