Get Rid of the Performative Land Acknowledgements
By 
A couple of years ago, I saw the superb Mali Obomsawin play with her jazz band. She is Abenaki. She started talking about land acknowledgements and called them “corny” before going on to say that the real land acknowledgment is knowing that her ancestor was imprisoned in Boston for practicing his religion. That got pretty well at the absurdity of land acknowledgements. What do they actually do? The answer is usually nothing. At first, one might argue they were useful in the sense of reminding folks that the land does have a Native history. But pretty quickly they became a way for whites to engage in performative liberalism without any kind of commitment and then they became a way for corporations and wealthy institutions to give lip service to something progressive while doing absolutely nothing for Native Americans here today, including people of the tribes being mentioned! This has bothered me for years now.
If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”
The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.
Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.
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The Native Governance Center notes that land acknowledgments often “become an excuse for folks to feel good and move on with their lives.” The journalists Graeme Wood and Noah Smith have criticized them as “moral exhibitionism” and ethnonationalism. In an interview Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous peoples law and policy program and a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, told me that if land acknowledgments “are treated as the only or last step of one’s commitment to Indigenous peoples and nations, then they can become more harmful than beneficial.”
Land acknowledgments tend to reinforce the myth of Native disappearance and irrelevance. In calling attention to dispossession, they often miss the point that Native Americans survived and are having a renaissance in culture and sovereignty. The vanishing-Indian myth has deep roots in American history. As part of taking Indigenous land, 19th-century Americans found it useful to believe that Indians were fading away. They described precolonial North America as a wilderness — “occupied by a few savage hunters,” as President Andrew Jackson put it, who “were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.” Jean O’Brien, a historian and citizen of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, called it a “narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”
Tribes are still here and have had to go to court to defend their remaining sovereignty and property, spending their revenue to buy back land that once was theirs. In 1996 the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians bought back one of their sacred sites, the Kituwah mound, which once sat at the center of the Cherokee Mother Town, and the Osage Nation has saved the only ancient pyramid mound remaining in St. Louis by buying its summit. In its 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the treaty-defined boundaries of the Muscogee, Cherokee, Quapaw, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations remain in full force because Congress never disestablished their reservations. Yet the State of Oklahoma has continued to fight tribal jurisdiction over criminal cases. If tribes didn’t have to spend revenue buying back land and defending their interests in court, they could use more of it on the health, education and criminal justice programs that benefit their citizens and their neighbors.
My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.
I know some of these people and respect them very much and I can’t agree more. Have your land acknowledgement if you want, but if you aren’t actively doing something within your power to remedy injustice today, then it’s totally worthless. If you are a university, are you offering free tuition and fees to the Tribes in your area? If you are a professor, are you assigning work by Native scholars or centering Native voices? If you are running a corporation, are you engaging in affirmative action plans for the Tribes? There lots of things we can be doing. But mostly, land acknowledgements exist to make whites feel good about themselves.