Land Acknowledgement

Amiskwaciy-waskahikan, Edmonton, is located where the prairie and boreal forest meet, a gathering place and home for many Indigenous peoples since time immemorial – including the Nehiyawak (neh-HEE-oh-wuk), Niitsitapi (Knee-tsit-da-be), Tsuu T'ina (SOO-tih-nah), and Michif Piyii peoples. It is now part of Treaty Six and the Métis homeland.

The King's University was founded by newcomers and settlers to this land who immigrated from the Netherlands, and has since grown to welcome students and staff from many places and cultures. We are grateful to live, learn, teach, and worship in this place.

At the same time, we grieve the historical and ongoing injustices that have resulted from settler colonialism on this land. We grieve for broken Treaty promises, forced displacements and land thefts, Residential Schools, bans on traditional language and cultural practices, and ongoing systemic racism. We grieve for our failure to live up to the best of our own spiritual tradition, and the subsequent broken relationships with others, the land, and our Creator.   

This mixture of gratitude and grief unsettles us, as it should. We commit ourselves to living into this discomfort and learning from it, allowing it to help us discern what our role may be in helping to set things right. We commit to continuing the work we began as a King’s community in 2014 in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “learning, listening, and telling the truth so that we can walk a life-affirming journey together.” We recognize that by our presence here, we too have become Treaty people. We commit ourselves to learning what this means, and how to be good neighbours with the original peoples of this land and with all our relations in Creation.