The Critical Refugee and Migration Studies Network of Canada acknowledges that the lands on which we live and work are the traditional territories of many Indigenous Nations on Turtle Island. As a research group that has lived experiences of forced migration and works with displaced peoples, we recognize the initial forced removal and genocide of Inuit, Métis, and First Nations people from these lands. We affirm our commitment and responsibility in improving our understanding and relationships with Indigenous peoples and their cultures.
 
We honor the legacy of African diaspora and Black lives, knowledges, skills, and labour that were stolen from Africa and placed in bondage in the Americas through colonialism and imperialism.  We acknowledge that much of the white/West and Global North’s structures and empire-building were built through the still-unpaid labour of Black people, who were forcibly displaced from their lands and exploited.
 
We understand that the digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures that we rely on in our work in reckoning with the histories of forced displacement – which continue to this day – are built on the extraction of resources which relies on the dispossession, displacement, and destruction of peoples and their social structures, ways of being, lands and waters across continents, particularly situated within the Global South – Africa, the Americas, and Asia. There is no digital space without place, without land, and without the Indigenous peoples of the land.
 
To our Indigenous and African forebears and to all those displaced from or within their Indigenous lands, we commit to the continued struggle for decolonization, liberation and reparations, for it is only through freedom and justice that we can truly give honor.