Yes, yes they are. But in this case the author is a Native American woman coming from a slightly different perspective. She recounts a land acknowledgement given at a church in upstate New York.
The guide acknowledged that we were standing on the ancestral homelands of the Munsee Lenape. He was a careful man in a careful place: the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller family’s church at the edge of their Kykuit estate in the Hudson Valley of New York. The morning light on the pews streamed in through stained-glass windows by Matisse and Chagall. A few people in the group glanced at me, the Native person in the room, as if to gauge whether what we’d just heard was acceptable.
“We’d like to think they are looking down on us, pleased with what we have done with the land,” the guide concluded his acknowledgment.
I thought about pulling him aside afterward, but my patience was low and I didn’t want to get into it on the first day of a multiday art tour.
In my view, land acknowledgements are a useless waste of time unless the people making them are seriously thinking about giving the land back. And does that ever happen? Not for the most part. The author of this piece sort of agrees, though her view is that Native Americans didn’t “own” the land in the first place.
In 2021, Indigenous anthropologists formally asked the American Anthropological Association to pause the practice. There was no evidence, they argued, that acknowledgments produce measurable change.
Because the ritual still treats land as something that can be owned, it names the theft while leaving the idea of ownership untouched. Indigenous relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about reciprocity, care, responsibility.
Again, that’s not my view, but if it were your view then land acknowledgements seem doubly useless. Not only are you not getting the land back or returned to the collective (or whatever) but you’re also not touching on a core difference between their world and ours.
The author even gave some grudging respect to conservative critics of the practice. They’re acting in bad faith she says (of course), but they have a point.
When the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened last month, its acknowledgment was thorough. The dedication honored the Anishinaabe and the Council of Three Fires. A permanent display on the campus names nine nations beyond them, refuses the past tense and quotes Mr. Obama on broken treaties and promises. The criticism came anyway, most of it from conservatives who would ridicule any acknowledgment at all. The center cost $850 million to construct; its museum charges $30 to enter. If you mean it, give it back, the conservatives said. They are not asking in good faith, but they are asking for the right thing. It names the gap between the words and anything the institution is willing to surrender.
She’s right that conservatives don’t really believe in the idea of returning the land, but also that the critics of land acknowledgements are just pointing out that progressives don’t believe in it either. They believe in a kind of empty ritual that makes them feel superior while changing absolutely nothing.
The comments are interesting. Here’s the top one.
The first time I heard an land acknowledgement, it caught my attention… it was novel and thought provoking. Eventually the practice became so commonplace that I realized it was simply performative progressive virtue-signalling that was creedal in nature. Now I just roll my eyes and tune out.
Yes, I think we all do. Some of us just pretend not to. But the #2 answer is even better.
Land changes hands all over the world. There is no original owner. What also is never mentioned is that different indigenous nations fought each other on the land, too. It’s not a question of giving anything back. The solution is for everyone who is on the land to treat it with respect and be welcoming to all who cross it. We have a hard time with this.
Land acknowledgments don’t help much with that, either. They are more about white guilt than anything. Which in itself is stupid: never in my life have I displaced anyone. Guilt is for the long dead. Feeling guilty about where you were born and the colour of your skin makes no sense. Focus on the positive, on the now and the future.
Exactly right. Land acknowledgements are about shaming the dead while you sit on and use the property you shame them for having stolen. Only a progressive could think this is good.
Thank you for this piece, Mr. Walker.
Land acknowledgments are nothing more than virtue signaling. I’ve always felt a deep discomfort after such pronouncements. Using the term, ‘stolen land’ and then proceeding with the program is meaningless to the people who were irreparably harmed.
Giving back a percentage of ticket sales would be a start in the right direction.
It’s warfare and fighting over land all the way down.
I have yet to hear a statement saying the Apaches owned this territory, which they stole from the Pueblo, who stole it from…., who stole it from the original natives who inhabited this land 22,000 years ago before the current crop of Native Americans came along and replaced them roughly 14,000 years ago.
One more that extends this point.
The native people of North America absolutely had concepts of territory. They engaged in conquest. They maintained enclosed villages and hunting grounds from which they extracted resources and would defend that territory from outsiders. A more accurate statement was that they did not necessarily have a concept of personal land ownership in fee simple. Land ownership was more similar to a collective trust for their defined community.
However, they did have other forms of personal property. Tools, weapons, clothing, sleeping mats, an area in shared lodging or a small dwelling all were possessed by individuals.
The romantic mythology expressed here is incorrect, kind of ridiculous, and a little offensive.
Land acknowledgements are dumb. It would be more honest for a spokesman to get up and praise his forbearers who seized the land so he could be the one welcoming other people to it many years later. Would it be offensive? Yes. But it would be more honest.
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