Dean M. Jacobs & Victor P. Lytwyn

Dean M. Jacobs and Victor P. Lytwyn, “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered”. Ontario History, Volume 112, Issue 2, Fall 2020, p. 191–210.

In “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered” Victor P. Lytwyn and Dean M. Jacobs reveal how land acknowledgements premised on faulty historical understandings of Indigenous land relationships serve to undermine contemporary Indigenous land rights and sovereignty.  Rigorously sourced and expansive in historical scope, this article contributes both to Anishinaabe political and diplomatic histories, as well as to vital contemporary questions around the potentially negative implications of land acknowledgements.  The authors provide a thoroughly researched example of the importance of understanding the grounded specificities of Indigenous treaties as international agreements that regulate and enact sovereign decision-making over territory, both historically and in the present. In this way, the award-winning article affirms the historical importance and long-standing realities of Indigenous governance and ways of relating to the land as well as other nations.