What to Do with Land Acknowledgements?
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I’ve stated my before that I am uncomfortable with land acknowledgements. Like, it’s fine for me to say I am on Narragansett land, which I am. But what does it mean for me to say so? Is it backed up with anything meaningful? Or does it exist to make me, a white liberal, feel good about myself, like so much of the rest of the conversation about diversity? Does it change a single thing? In other words, if this sort of thing is going to matter, it means wresting power from the colonial enterprises that continue to dominate and oppress Native peoples and restructuring the nation and its institutions to shift power to them. If that means I don’t get to feel good about my own righteous commitment to diversity, well, tough on me. I can pound sand.
This is a good discussion of the issue from a few weeks back:
Land acknowledgments are becoming more common in the United States, too, from college events to city council meetings to the Oscars, even as the number of race-based mascots dwindles. That’s a big step forward, from a tomahawk chop of a stereotype to a bow of respect.
But it’s just a step. The problem with land acknowledgments, as Indigenous activist John Kane told me, is that “acknowledging that we once lived in a place or somehow contributed to someone else’s society does nothing for ours.”
Kane, a graduate of Cambridge schools, a Mohawk and the host of the podcast “Let’s Talk Native,” started the petition in 2020 that led the Cambridge community to face the mascot question.
“Don’t tell us how great we were,” he wrote to me. “We are still here and we AREN’T doing that great now. We fight everyday over taxes, autonomy and our distinction. We fight poverty, racism, abuse of our women and children, drugs, alcohol and depression on our territories. We fight against the lack of opportunities of any prospects for the future of our people on our lands.”
Land acknowledgments risk doing — albeit in a far less offensive way — what mascots do: relegate Native people to a hazy past, while relieving us of the responsibility to do anything to know or help Native Americans in the present.
No institution should get to make a land acknowledgment unless it is also backing it up with action, whether financial, political or educational. A university, for instance, could offer courses in Indigenous languages, grant free tuition to Native students, repatriate tribal artifacts and even return land.
And a school district? If it’s truly searching for a way to honor Native culture, it could start each day by recognizing the Indigenous peoples whose land it occupies. Then it could develop curriculums that teach Native American reality, past and present. That would all take time, money and effort. But fighting to hang on to a racist mascot does, too.
One thing I’ve pointed out repeatedly in grave posts of those were at least purportedly anti-slavery is how so much of that movement was really another way of performing white supremacy. Those were people far more concerned with how slavery impacted white people than how it impacted the slaves. Diversity rhetoric can be another version of this–a way to separate ourselves from those really bad bad whites but not really doing much of anything except performing my white privilege a different way that, in this case, does squat for the tribes. I don’t want them to have a seat at the table. I want them to have the keys to do whatever they want. It’s up to me to listen and follow.