For the third straight year, Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays opened its season at home with an acknowledgement that the team is actually playing on Indigenous land.
It is also the fourth season the team has included land acknowledgements at home games. Since late September 2021, the Blue Jays organization — along with pro teams the Toronto Raptors and Toronto Maple Leafs — has declared before games that Rogers Centre is actually on the “traditional territory” of native people.
This declaration was made around the time Canada recognized National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as a holiday in the country, which was previously known as Orange Shirt Day, and was celebrated as such by the Toronto sports teams, per the National Post.
The Blue Jays organization has recognized that it is “based on Treaty 13 lands – traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit,” its website has described. It also recognizes that the team is “located on the traditional home of many other nations including the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat Peoples.”
Anishinaabeg, for example, is not a specific tribe, rather it is a series of tribes grouped seemingly for the purpose of referring to the region around the Great Lakes in the United States and Canada, typically for political activism.
“We are honored to work with and learn from communities all across this country now referred to as Canada,” the official acknowledgement continued. “Therefore, we want to acknowledge all First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples whose original and treaty territories we stand upon across Turtle Island (aka, North America).”
The more recent iteration of the land acknowledgment varies greatly from that of 2021, which was authored by a Canadian “artist and Ancestral Knowledge Keeper.”
This rendition included acknowledgement of “our Mother the Earth” and the “Seven Grandfather teachings: Wisdom, Bravery, Respect, Honesty, Truth, Humility, and Love.”
It also made sure to acknowledge the “medicine wheel and its teachings,” in addition to the four cardinal directions and all four seasons.
The Blue Jays organization has certainly worked in a series of political dedications as part of its ongoing reconciliation project.
This has included providing “anti-racism awareness and training programs” and adhering to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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