Land Acknowledgement & Prayer
Land Acknowledgement:
I join you today from my home about forty kilometers south of Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory — the traditional land of the Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, Nakota Sioux, and Métis peoples.
Treaty 6 was signed in 1876 as the buffalo herds collapsed due to settler overhunting, and starvation spread across the Plains. Cree leaders entered the treaty to share their lands and coexist peacefully, securing their future in the face of starvation. But after it was signed, the Crown imposed the Indian Act, creating the Enoch Reserve in 1889 (which is 40 km north of my house) and 4 Maskwacîs Reserves in the 1880s (which are 30 km south of my house), and confined Cree Nations to these reserves through the Pass System. Settler agriculture was protected through rules restricting what Cree people could grow and sell. To eliminate Cree people as a distinct Nation, children were taken to the Poundmaker and Ermineskin residential schools. Over the next 50 years, the government seized half of Enoch’s reserve and turned another 4,000 acres into a WWII bombing range.
Yet the Cree Nations endured. In the 1970s and 1980s, Maskwacîs Cree leaders won legal battles asserting their treaty rights over oil and gas revenues, and in 2006, Enoch Cree leaders won compensation for damages from the bombing range. Further legal battles have been won to assert treaty rights over education, child welfare, and land governance.
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I share this to honour the history of the land I live on, the harm done here, and the enduring strength and self-determination of the Cree peoples. As we gather this Thanksgiving, I hold gratitude alongside truth, knowing that true thankfulness must include awareness and a commitment to justice.
Prayer:
O God of life and love and peace,
we give thanks for the living tapestry of Your creation,
for mountains and rivers, creatures great and small,
and for the flourishing of humankind,
for medicine, work, and the hands that build and heal,
for the beauty of cultures and the wisdom of community.
Yet we confess how fear and greed have dimmed that light,
how the gifts meant for all have too often been monopolized by a few.
Teach us again to listen, to the land, to one another,
to the quiet truth that our flourishing is bound together.
In a world trembling with war and hunger,
breathe wisdom into leaders and courage into us all.
Renew the earth, O God, and renew our hearts,
that peace may not be a dream but a shared work of love.
Amen.
