IRCC Anti-Racism Strategy 2.0 (2021-2024) – An acknowledgement to Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Our efforts to advance Anti-Racism can only be truly realized with recognition of the unjust consequences of white-settler colonialism, our continued commitment to decolonization, and incessant striving to advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Given the immigration system’s historical and ongoing impact on the colonization of Indigenous Peoples, we bear the duty of maintaining the memory of the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the responsibility to seek creative ways of demonstrating our solidarity with Indigenous People’s struggles for recognition.

We would like to begin by acknowledging that the lands on which many of us live, work and gather, including the digital infrastructure enabling our work, are on the traditional territories of Indigenous nations. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)’s regional and international offices are also situated on a number of Indigenous territories’ throughout the country and abroad. We acknowledge that our national headquarters in Ottawa are on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishnaabe Algonquin nation whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial.

We respect the enduring presence and longstanding ties that Indigenous Peoples have to this land where we reside and flourish, however and whenever we may have come and settled. In recognition of the many and different territorial lands that each reader may be coming from, we encourage you to do your research and learn about the territory on which you reside. Explore how you can recognize the history of settler expansion and uplift the equity and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in your own way. We all share in the responsibility as Canadians—as Treaty peoples—to maintain respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples.