In this context, the term has become a powerful yet fraught political tool. Its frequent invocation risks transforming it into a rhetorical device — one that can be co-opted, weaponized, or emptied of its meaning.

 

This project explores that tension by placing a simple phrase — “You are standing on Indigenous land” — onto photographs of landscapes connected to Indigenous identity. The act is quiet, but the gesture is complex. It asks: who is the land speaking for, and who is speaking for the land?

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As a person that uses this term to name myself often, I use this process to examine my relationship to place, identity, and belonging. What does it mean to “stand on” land, rather than belong to it? How has the concept of Indigeneity shaped how I understand myself — not only as someone that straddles dominant whiteness, but as someone historically positioned as a permanent minority within settler-colonial frameworks?

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Referencing Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, this work questions whether we can move beyond the fixed identities imposed by settler logics. Can we imagine forms of civic inclusion that do not rely on identity politics or exclusionary claims to land? Can we unmake the categories that have kept us divided — and instead forge visionary, place-based practices rooted in responsibility, care, and shared future?