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