Sasha Sagan

Sasha Sagan Instagram – Recently, while planning the online conversation I did with the lovely @michaelakalowski for the @brisbane_writers_festival I learned about an Australian ritual that I had never heard of before. Michaela taught me that at the beginning of events there is sometimes an “acknowledgment of country”, a show of respect for the particular Aboriginal clan whose land is being inhabited. It’s a brief but meaningful recognition of the people who lived there first and implicitly how it was lost through colonialism and imperialism. What if we did this in the United States? What if we spent just a moment before a conference or a concert forcing ourselves to face our history? What if we made ourselves talk about how this nation really came to be? What if before a session of Congress or an Oval Office address we as a nation acknowledged we are conducting our business, say, on the land of Nacotchtank in buildings built by the forced labor of enslaved people? How might that change our perspective and inform our decisions? I don’t know, but I’ll be thinking about it tomorrow while I re-read Frederick Douglass’s essay “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” on Nauset land. #fourthofjuly | Posted on 04/Jul/2020 01:51:28