SSUNS 2026 is on the way! Stay tuned for website updates…
SSUNS 2026 will be held from November 12th-15th at Le Centre Sheraton Montreal.
Registration opens April 1st!
See you soon!
Statement on Land Acknowledgements, 2026
SSUNS 2026 will be held at the Sheraton Hotel, with preparatory work accomplished at McGill University. Both sites are located in Montréal, known as Tiohti:áke to the Kanien'kehá:ka Nation, a founding nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This territory is unceded; not surrendered, not purchased, and not resolved by any legal or moral framework we can point to with integrity. The sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe nations was never extinguished. It has simply gone unrecognized by the colonial states that displaced them and the political and economic structures that have continued to benefit from that displacement.
The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from these lands is not a historical rupture but an ongoing condition of settler-colonial states. That dispossession has never fallen equally: Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people continue to face disproportionate rates of violence and institutional neglect; a pattern the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls identified as genocide in 2019. Indigenous communities facing poverty, inadequate housing, and lack of clean water are not experiencing the failures of existing systems. They are experiencing those systems functioning exactly as designed.
Land acknowledgements, as commonly practiced, warrant serious scrutiny. Indigenous scholarship has argued compellingly that recognition politics, the notion that naming colonial history constitutes meaningful justice, can reinforce settler power by substituting symbolic gestures for structural accountability. An acknowledgement that is read and set aside does not challenge the institutions or distributions of power that perpetuate Indigenous dispossession. SSUNS is not exempt from this critique.
This statement marks not an achievement, but a starting point; one that demands more of us than words. Genuine reconciliation requires the restoration of Indigenous land, life, and self-determination on Indigenous terms, not settler ones. SSUNS is committed to approaching this as an ongoing institutional responsibility, one that implicates our programming, our partnerships, and the material choices we make as an organization.
Further Resources:
Allyship tools from the Montreal Indigenous Community NETWORK: https://reseaumtlnetwork.com/en/being-an-ally/our-tools/
Glen Coulthard, *Red Skin, White Masks* (2014): https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/red-skin-white-masks
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, *As We Have Always Done* (2017): https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/as-we-have-always-done
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Final Report (2019): https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/
For information on further initiatives, contact our Chief of Human Resources at hr@ssuns.org.