This Land

At Scarborough Community Legal Services, we encourage our staff, members, potential job candidates, and wider community and partners to learn more about the land on which we live and the nations that have been the stewards of this place since time immemorial. 

This Land

Scarborough, this place in which we work and live together, is the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and traditional territories of many nations including the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy while continuing to be home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples from across these territories. As a legal service provider within these territories, we must acknowledge the power and responsibility that we have to uphold Indigenous peoples and nations’ rights and to challenge the colonial legal system.

 

Toronto, Colonial Acts of Violence, and Anti-Black Racism

Related to this land acknowledgement, we also must acknowledge that Toronto has been the site and origin point of many colonial acts which have impacted Indigenous peoples throughout Ontario, in other regions of Canada, and the wider world. These actions of colonial systems that are based here—because of the dispossession of Indigenous nations here have impacted many communities. In particular, this Clinic acknowledges the Indigenous Africans who were forcefully removed from their native lands, particularly as a result of slavery and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This involuntary migration heavily contributed to the movement of African-descended people across the African diaspora to places like Canada and Toronto. We honour, pay tribute and invite into the space ancestors of African Origin and Descent.

As actors in the justice system, it is particularly important for us to acknowledge the grave injustice of Canada’s justice system. Its failure to deliver justice to Indigenous and Black people has ensured long-term damage to their communities. As organizations, we continue to explore our role in this system and must take responsibility for our actions—and inactions—
within it.

What Are We Doing?

More to Come!

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