Seed Room Consulting
We acknowledge that the land on which Sobia lives and works is the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq People and we are governed by the Peace and Friendship Treaty. We believe in honouring the treaties but also recognizing that many treaties were signed under duress and false pretenses set by the Crown.
Mueni resides in Denmark, on lands that are part of the traditional territory of the Sámi people and maintain a complex colonial relationship with Greenland—home to the Inuit, who make up nearly 90% of Greenland's population . Denmark's colonization of Greenland began in 1721 and formally ended in 1953, but the harms of that colonial project continue to reverberate .
In the Danish context, there were no treaties, only the imposition of colonial rule and, later, what Greenlanders call "hidden colonization": a period after 1953 when Greenland was officially part of Denmark but real power remained in Copenhagen, and Inuit culture, language, and bodies were treated as problems to be solved .
We recognize that European colonization of Turtle Island established the white supremacist systems and structures we work to dismantle today.
We recognize too that Denmark's colonial project in Greenland was driven by the same logic: that Indigenous peoples needed to be "civilized," Christianized, and assimilated. This logic produced devastating harms, including children being forcibly taken from their families—a practice that continues today—stripped of their language and culture, and the forced sterilization of thousands of Inuit women and girls in a state-sponsored campaign to limit Greenland's birthrate . These were not aberrations; they were expressions of a colonial mindset that devalued Indigenous life.
We come with respect for this land and for the people who have and do reside here. As racialized people our relationship to the land is different than that of white settlers, and we work actively to navigate that in ways that do not further harm Indigenous peoples.
In Denmark, this means reckoning with a different kind of position: Denmark is a European nation with its own colonial history, and racialized people living here are navigating land that was colonized by the Danish state. Our presence does not erase that history. We are committed to understanding how we might inadvertently benefit from or reproduce colonial dynamics, and to standing in solidarity with Indigenous peoples—both Sámi in the Nordic region and Inuit from Greenland, many of whom now live in Denmark and face ongoing discrimination in housing, healthcare, and child welfare .
Today, United States imperialism poses a new threat to Greenland, and this reminds us that it has always been a threat to BIPOC communities globally. This is part of a broader pattern: from South America to the Caribbean to Africa to Asia, the US empire operates through economic coercion, military threat, and the relentless pursuit of resources at the expense of sovereign peoples.
We are grateful for the opportunity to build community, learn, and work on this land, and commit to ongoing learning and action toward decolonization and reconciliation.
We also recognize that struggles for justice—locally and globally—are interconnected, and we are committed to solidarity and anti-oppression for everyone.
The struggle of Inuit in Greenland for true self-determination is connected to the struggle of Mi'kmaq people in Mi’kmaqi. Both are connected to the struggles of Indigenous peoples everywhere against resource extraction, cultural erasure, and the ongoing violence of colonial institutions. And both are connected to the struggles of peoples across the Global South - from Haiti to Palestine - who face the same imperial and colonial forces. We see these connections and commit to acting on them.
We invite you to take the time needed to notice the effects of colonial violence on Indigenous bodies: Indigenous peoples tirelessly experiencing racism in healthcare, in education, in their places of employment, in courtrooms, in prisons, and while doing basic errands like shopping for groceries and banking.
In Greenland and Denmark, this violence takes specific forms: Inuit children removed from their families at rates far higher than non-Indigenous children ; Inuit adults facing prejudice in housing and employment; a language and culture that were nearly erased by assimilation policies; and a popular culture that still uses racist phrases without recognizing the weight of those words .
And then we invite you to disrupt this violence, to hold the tension of these realizations, to accept the brutal truth, and to commit to honesty in working toward healing, reconnection, reconciliation, relationship.
As part of our commitment to reframe our responsibilities to land and community we use the following questions as a guide and we encourage other non-Indigenous people to do the same:
What relationship with land should we (as racialized and non-racialized) settlers of Indigenous lands choose to foster?
What relationship with the land do we currently have? Is it one of care and stewardship or exploitation and extraction? Which relationship do we wish to foster?
Does our being here support the healing or harm of this place and all forms of life?
For settlers like us, brought to or born in lands we settle upon, what relationship do we and should we have with the land of our roots? Especially given our roots are places which have also experienced the violence of colonization.
How did we arrive at Turtle Island, and to Epek'twik specifically? Where are we going?
For those of us in Denmark: How did we arrive here? What histories brought us to this land? What does it mean to live on land that was itself part of a colonial project? How do we honor Indigenous sovereignty here, when Indigenous peoples—Sámi and Inuit—have been systematically marginalized by the Danish state? These questions have no easy answers, but we commit to holding them.