“We’re located on Dakota land”

88 thoughts on ““We’re located on Dakota land””

1. I don’t take issue with land acknowledgements. Canadians and Aussies have been doing this for years. I know the Aussies have because I attended and presented at an international conference a few weeks back and when I attended ones based out of Australia, they opened with a land acknowledgement. I also opened my presentation with a land acknowledgement. I think it’s nice to acknowledge the stewardship of the land on which your institution/organization flourishes. My acknowledgement for where I am based at work “is located on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and the Haudenausonee nations and within the lands protected by the ‘Dish With One Spoon’ wampum agreement.” Canada considers this a small part of reconciliation which is a big part of what we are doing in Canada (very similar in Australia). It’s not really about virtue but about respect and it’s only one thing that is being done (at least in Canada).

   1. For Australians like me who grew up in a culture that doggedly ignored or denied the mere existence of other occupants, who have been there about 50 000 years longer than Europeans, acknowledgements like these are important. Not just for increasing awareness of Aboriginal rights, but also for our our own mental health. It is not good to be fundamentally divorced from reality, as was the culture I grew up in, in this regard.

2. It’s about virtue and respect, but the respect is cheap if you don’t do anything but mouth words, which, of course, is what the vast majority of people do who emit these things. Talk is cheap. Improving the lot of the people you stole from is much harder. But there are ways to help; I just added five or six to the site, and Tippett & Co. don’t mention any of them.

   1. It’s not just talk here though. We have commissions set up. There have been political changes and institutional changes and programs. And we didn’t steal the land here; The indigenous where I am were not conquered but made treaties with the crown. The land acknowledgement acknowledges who the people were who were stewards of the land before now. It’s not about improving “the lot” but about acknowledging them.

      1. I’m pretty sure a case could be made that there was no informed consent in the part of the indigenous people.

         1. I don’t think so in this case. Each treaty in each location is different. There is some self governing nations here in Canada. I”m not saying they weren’t treated badly and still are but their land was not stolen. There are legal rights they still call upon and Various nations have some prime land here. The land acknowledgement isn’t about land theft, it’s about acknowledging who was and still is here. It’s one tiny bit we can do for reconciliation in a long, sordid history that is still playing out today.

      2. It’s quite obvious that there was no informed consent on the part of the indigenous people.

         That land was stolen from them.

         No amount of royal commissions or cheap platitudes justifies this.

         After several hundred years, native people in Canada can’t even get clean water.

         1. I’ve constantly bitched to government about northern reserves with water issues. It’s my opinion that this is a form of racism. Along with missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. The government is so slow in dealing with this….how can this not be looked at with all the money and power of the federal government? What is the inertia. Well, with the water I simply think it’s that people don’t care about what they can’t see and racism figures into some of it as well. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do a land acknowledgement. We can actually do many things at once. I urge you to write your MP about this.

3. Maybe “keeping the issue alive by talking about it” and “at least acknowledging the truth – that it is rightly Native American land” are worth something.

4. There is no piece of even marginally habitable real-estate on this planet that has not been violently taken from the previous owners, many times.

   It’s all soaked in blood.

   1. Yup, Britain hasn’t had a penny from the Normans and we’ve been waiting since 1066. As for those tight-fisted Angles and Jutes… And the only Roman coins here are the ones they accidentally lost.

      1. I have neanderthal genes.

         When am I getting my fair share from all of you pure-blooded homo sapiens for the crime of wiping my ancestors from existence?

         1. Your missing out on the backdated royalties for your ancestors’ cave paintings, too: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/neanderthals-cave-art-humans-evolution-science/

         2. Since you have some of their genes in your genome – (so do I and quite a few) – the Neanderthals are not completely extinct, they have simply chosen new phenotypes in which they live on … .

   2. this is not the strongest argument against violently taking property though, is it.

      1. Did you read it that way? I didn’t.

      2. It was descriptive, not prescriptive.

   3. Exactly. We owe it ourselves to make sure we learn about this through the study of history, just as we owe it to ourselves not to engage in masochistic breast-beating or useless acts like Tippett’s. Every educated adult American should know that the land once belonged to Native Americans. But engaging in speech acts like Tippett’s is not only redundant but also useless moral vanity if it’s not linked to a concrete suggestion for the benefit of today’s Native Americans.

   4. Antarctica. Marginally habitable by scientists and perhaps Greenland. I don’t know if anyone lived there before.

   5. There’s one bit of habitable real-estate that was not inhabited until recent times — the Falkland Islands. It never had an ancient indigenous population. The first settlers were British. At the time they arrived there were about 9 people there, mostly from Uruguay, and themselves recent arrivals, who made a living ranching cattle to sell provisions to whaling ships. The British asked them to stay and most of them did. (Argentina didn’t even exist at this point.) From there developed the only settled population that the Falkland Islands have ever had, passing farms down the generations.

      And the irony is that the UN declares that this population have no right to the Islands, with the UN refusing to recognise them or give then any standing in the sovereignty of the Islands!

5. Steve has it right.

6. I do agree that these acknowledgements are mostly a form of moral preening, and in Canada they have become a kind of ritual genuflection at the start of public events. Well, I’m not a fan of ritual genuflections. It may be that First Nations individuals find the acknowledgement meaningful and comforting, in which case I’m glad it performs that service. But the real, and important, part of the reconciliation work that Diana alludes to above are the legal negotiations on treaties — there’s a good FAQ page on the process in British Columbia at http://www.bctreaty.ca/faq. One interesting point to note there is: “The BC treaty negotiations process has always been guided by the principle that private property (fee simple land) is not on the negotiation table, except on a willing-buyer, willing-seller basis”. By making this clear from the start, it helps allay fear of the “slippery-slope” scenario where traditional-use acknowledgement ends up being leveraged in court as a basis for demanding the return of now privately-owned land.

   1. If Tippett gave some real help to the Dakota, or even had a list on that site about how to donate to help them, I probably wouldn’t have written this post.

      1. Indeed, this point was emphasised several times very clearly in the post. Nevertheless, it attracted comments from readers attempting to draw equivalences between the Sioux and the British, for example.

         1. I was being slightly flippant at #3, but is there really anything about the waves of invasion of the British Isles by groups from mainland Europe that makes the subjection and eradication of the indigenous culture of, say, the Iceni by the Romans, that different from colonialism elsewhere in the world? (Yes, I fully appreciate that the British subsequently applied the lessons they learned in a manner that is no longer acceptable or defensible in the modern world. Although it is also arguable that the American War of Independence was, at least in part, triggered by the refusal of the British to allow westward expansion by the colonies because that would involve breaking treaties already negotiated with Native Americans.)

            1. If the Iceni were still around and still disadvantaged, then no there would be no difference.
               I am really quite baffled by the hostility to the simple acknowledgement of past injustices and their continuing effects.

            2. I’m not sure there’s so much hostility to acknowledging it as hostility to the strategic use of injustice-acknowledgement for woke political purposes. The fact is that injustice is as old and as ubiquitous as humanity. The fight against injustice is noble and correct. But pretending that people divide into simple victim/perpetrator is shallow at best. Focusing on the history of victimization instead of focusing on solutions that improve the human condition is worse than useless, it inhibits actual social progress.

            3. > Focusing on the history of victimization instead of focusing on solutions that improve the human condition is worse than useless […]

               I am dismayed that there are still international disputes about WW2 since they tend to harm anyone involved. For a positive counterexample, consider Germany and France. After centuries of enmity, both countries achieved good relations by deliberately not dwelling on past atrocities. Instead, they bet on student exchanges and economic cooperation.

            4. Quite so. Focusing on victim/oppressor history is to try and split very grey, sometimes unknowable, history into artificial black and white camps. There is already to much black-and-white thinking – because it will usually walk away from reality and end up in absurdity.

            5. I thought I had acknowledged past injustices, Yakaru, but flagged up some others, too?

               “If the Iceni were still around” – doubtless there’s a lesson there for China and its treatment of the Uyghurs…!

            6. I don’t mean to be too snarky, and my perspective is perhaps different to those living in the US.

               I grew up in Australia where the original invaders declared the continent uninhabited and has spent more than two centuries in continual denial. In school I learned the Aborigines arrived a couple of hundred years before Europeans, so dispossession wasn’t such a big deal.

               Of course, a decade later it was discovered that Aboriginal claims of having been there *much* longer were in fact true. The level of denial was always far greater in Australia than the US, along with the degree of absurdity of the denial.

            7. They never went away as far as we know, but were subsumed & Romanised. Their descendants in turn became Anglicised, then Danicised, before the Normans who while influencing greatly, lost their recently acquired Norman French, & gradually formed mediaeval England. No one can untangle his ancestry into discrete units of this or that culture or ethnicity.

         2. It is not equivalent… 😥
            [But I cannot blame some individuals now for the actions of others in the past. This is where states have to take responsibility.]

      2. Why would Tippet play against type on this issue? She provides nothing useful anywhere else, either.

         When she is on, I go the the cassette for some Miles or Brubeck

   2. … Canada mostly supported apartheid in South Africa. First, by providing it with a model. South Africa patterned its policy towards Blacks after Canadian policy towards First Nations. Ambiguous Champion explains, “South African officials regularly came to Canada to examine reserves set aside for First Nations, following colleagues who had studied residential schools in earlier parts of the century.”

      https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/our-shame-canada-supported-apartheid-south-africa1

      1. So? That’s why we need reconciliation.

7. It’s unclear to me if they are saying they are on land that is currently Dakota, or land that was improperly taken from the Dakota. If the latter, then this strikes me as the lamest virtue signaling.

   1. I’m sure it’s the latter.

   2. When you criticize people for virtue signaling, you’re signaling your own virtue. You’re saying that your virtue is better than their virtue. As time goes by, I am finding the accusation of “virtual signaling” as more and more repugnant. Rather than criticizing the substance of the other person’s arguments, you are saying that the other person is doing nothing more than saying how noble he or she is and this apparent immodesty is not a good thing as it is service of something you don’t consider virtuous at all. You, of course, are showing your own perceived and in your mind true virtue by attacking the other person’s virtue. The labeling someone as exhibiting virtue signaling is nothing more than an ad hominin attack.

      1. Well, to be fair, criticizing someone for virtue signaling IS “criticizing the substance of the other person’s arguments” if signalling their virtue is all the other person is doing.

         1. Somehow Historian fails to realize that.

         2. I think the key aspect of virtue signaling, to my mind, is that the signaler is doing it primarily or solely for their benefit, not the benefit of other people.

      2. This is one of the most contorted arguments I’ve seen here. Where do I tout my own virtue? I’m not saying “I’m good because I love Native Americans and decry their exploitation.” I’m saying, “These people are pompous and flaunting a nonexistent commitment.” The only substance to their argument could be that they are reminding us of colonial exploitation, but this is not at all new. What’s left is simply “Look how good I am.” THAT is the substance of their argument.

         You seem unable to distinguish criticism of empty gestures–or ANY criticism–from “virtue signaling.” I could accuse YOU of virtue signaling by calling out my own “virtue signaling,” but that’s an infinite regress.

         I’ll just say that this is a rude comment, as well as a crazy one, and you should apologize.

         1. I was criticizing the specific expression “virtual signaling,” which you did not use in this post, but Dr. Brydon did. My point is that the use of this expression is meaningless as a mode of criticism, since almost everybody considers themselves virtuous, implicitly or explicitly, and this is manifested in what people do. If one finds another person’s arguments without substance, that’s all that needs to be said. Attacking the other person for supposedly flaunting his or her virtue gets one nowhere because virtue signaling is what everyone does although often on an unconscious level.

            You sometimes compile lists of words and expressions you disapprove of. I was merely indicating that I would put the expression “virtue signaling” on my list. It was not intended as a personal attack on any person. And, yes, I could be accused of virtue signaling myself because everyone does it. Again, that is why I think it gets us nowhere.

            1. Moral preening is the same thing as virtue signaling. I don’t get how you fail to perceive your comment as rude.

         2. Historian’s argumentation is totally flawed, since it is based on a fundamental misconception of what signalling virtue actually is.
            He simply confuses it with the concept of self-esteem (“since almost everyone considers themselves virtuous, implicitly or explicitly, and this is manifested in what people do”).
            Not surprisingly, he believes that anyone who expresses any (opposing) opinion is always someone who inevitably wants to signal virtue.
            As a ” historian” he should (be able to) recognise that virtue signalling is something quite different, which can only function in specific social conditions, namely only if the sending out of virtue signals is in accordance with prevailing convictions of specific virtues.
            In contrast, the maintenance of self-esteem functions independently of society; resistance fighters, revolutionaries can still maintain their self-esteem even in prison or even on the scaffold, there is no need for a mainstream that shares their convictions.
            On the contrary, virtue signalling virtue is never possible without relevant social or media approval, even if it is individually in the service of self-esteem.

8. “Maybe I’m being uncharitable here, but I really do see land acknowledgments as a cringeworthy form of moral preening. When Grania was alive and we had our frequent discussions abut this kind of thing, she always told me, “When you evaluate stuff like this, ask yourself whether these acts really improve the situation they highlight.” In this case, I think the answer is clearly “no.”

   So glad you wrote this. During Thanksgiving, I almost made it through the festivities without getting into an argument with my super-woke in-law. Then at some point the discussion turned to native americans (in which I was corrected because that term is no longer considered appropriate), and their plight.

   I got frustrated with the moralizing, and blurted out “Well, you live on land stolen from indigenous peoples, why don’t you give it back to them then? Or pay them for it. Or go help out on a reservation. Maybe do something other than bloody lecture others!”

9. It is a long sad story in our American history but not long after the George Washington took office and selected his cabinet (all four of them) his Secretary of War came to him with a plan to make a treaty with the Indians. Washington was all in favor of that and they proceeded to create such a treaty. This involved a great deal of land in what is now Georgia. All of the Chiefs made a big trip to see Washington (in New York) at the time and they had a great time and attended lots of dinners. The negotiations involved giving the Indians much of the land down there and everyone left happy. Soon after the white people began moving into the area in large number and basically the local people totally ignored the treaty that Washington had signed with the Indians. It soon became clear that Washington and his new government had no control over the people and what they did. The entire process turned into a mess with the Indians getting nothing. After this great failure Washington never attempted another negotiation with the Indians.

   1. Yes, the dispossession of the Native Americans became sadly inevitable when America became a viable place for immigration.

      And today, unless someone like Tippett is actually standing on a reservation, the “native land” comment is now untrue. Today the land belongs to the USA and houses far more people than it did before the Europeans arrived. They are not going anywhere.

      PCC did the right thing by actually suggesting ways to help today’s Native Americans, instead of engaging in the useless moral vanity of people like Tippett, which leads to the woke moral masochism of the “America is evil” variety.

10. This issue often occurs to me when I hear denunciations of Zionism for the alleged seizure of Arab land (despite that every square centimeter of Jewish-owned land in Israel in 1948 had been purchased from Arab or Turkish landholders at market price). Passionate devotees of indigenous Arab land ownership at, for example, Brown University, could arrange to donate their university and their own homes to the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians, from whom European settlers seized Rhode Island—but, for some reason, such idealists never get around to proposing that, let alone doing it.

    1. manhattan was also paid for. but citing the ottoman owners in turkey selling arab lands is like saying since george II gave my ancestors a grant to north georgia, the cherokee had no claim to their land. (i’m not a passionate devotee of indigenous arab or other group’s land ownership, and see this as a ‘no true scotsman’ fallacy, but wonder about the ethics and justice of this)

       1. It was not the Ottoman government who sold the land, it was local landholders, most of them “indigenous”, i.e. people whose forbears had been there for many centuries. The most “indigenous” of them in the sense of long local roots were probably the Christians and Druze, not necessarily Sunni Arabs (Muslim Arabs from elswhere conquered the area just as the Ottomans did).

11. “it’s a good thing for me” is a shaky basis for moral discussions.

    the principle invoked here appears to be “might makes right”?

    i’m not sure what the ‘on being’ writers see as acceptable redress of this might be, but i’m not sure that failing to express that, or even failing to have something in mind unsaid says much.

    the owner of a stolen art work may likewise not be willing to part with it, particularly if they paid good money in good faith for it. nonetheless, we repatriate and return these when possible. it can cause significant harm to the returner.

    i wouldn’t like it if the title to my property in georgia were transferred to the cherokee nation. it would be a bad thing for me. but i’m not sure what ethical objection i’d be able to muster; i’d expect that since i bought in good faith, and made improvements, some recognition of that be recognized, but recognize myself that i benefitted from a moral outrage.

    i see significant parallels between the native american experience and the native palestinian experience. aren’t we seeing much of this story repeated? arguments emphasizing the bloodthirsty nature of some folks has been and is used to justify various degrees of ethnic cleansing, and fait accompli is employed as well. they seem to sidestep the core of the discussion. justifications from tit for tat atrocities between native americans and colonists or others in similar situations today which are preceded by discrete starting points are secondary to the ethical/moral issues posed by the starting points, aren’t they?

    1. There is no parallel between the Native American experience and the “native Palestinian” experience. Palestinian Arabs came to the land encompassing Israel, Judea and Samaria as conquerors. The native Jews, living there, were partly expelled previously by the Roman Empire but later returned in substantial numbers (and a substantial number of them never left). After some time, Arabs started to expel the Jews again. Arabs lost this land to other diverse conquerors and finally to the Turks, who ruled this as a province of their Empire for several hundred years until World War I.

       The land was sparsely populated and there were marshes and deserts. With the advent of modern Zionism in the middle of 19th century, Jews started to return to their homeland. They BOUGHT the land (mostly those marshes and deserts for exorbitant prices (not for some beads or other useless baubles and the land was not taken by faudulent treaties). No land was taken by force or in any way illegally–not one square centimeter.

       Compare this to behavior of European colonists towards Native Americans. The Jewish immigrants started to develop the country and the economic situation there was incomparably better than in the surrounding areas. Because of this, impoverished Arabs began to immigrate to the developed areas. Because during the British Mandate the British severely restricted Jewish Immigration but allowed unrestricted Arab immigration– ultimately from the end of 19th century until 1947–there was a significantly larger number of Arab immigrants than of Jewish immigrants.

       I would like to recommend an article by a Native American activist, Ryan Bellerose, who explains what “being native people” means and why Jews are native to Israel: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bellerose-aboriginal-people

       1. we apparently operate under different fact sets. i’m aware of absentee owners selling land in palestine acquired similar to easterners acquiring native american lands and selling them later; citing that process as validly acquiring it from native americans is as shaky as citing ottoman sales of village land in palestine, isn’t it?

          but wasn’t there in the past, and isn’t there today acquisition which is more like ethnic cleansing? incidents like dier yassin certainly weren’t fee simple sales but were effective at clearing out arab inhabitants in many villages; jewish historians have documented what we’d call moral outrages or terrorism. annexing lands certainly isn’t buying them from willing inhabitants.

          what special status should nativism or indigeneous status grant to jews in the land today?

          1. There are facts and there are narratives, and nobody knows all the facts. In times when the land was owned by only a few—usually not by the ones who really tilled the soil—if you wanted to buy the land, you had to buy it from the owner. In Israel’s case, these were Turkish and Arabs landowners (not Jewish land owners, as in your comparison with white settlers buying Native American lands and selling them later). There are many contemporary documents showing both of these types of transactions as well as attempts of Zionists to deal justly with fellahim. That the dealings were not always just shows only that Jews are like other people—as with other people, Jews are not 100% free of crooks, which occur in every other nation. You can find the documents about land purchase (and much more) in a book by Arieh L. Avneri, “The Claim of Dispossession. Jewish Land-Settlement” MOreover Jews were mostly sold the land not used for anything, and not deemed arable by either landlords or fellahim, the problem was marginal.

             For almost two thousand years, since the fall of Jewish kingdoms, there was no independent state in this area (with the exception of a short-lived Crusaders’ enterprise). It was always a province (or rather differently divided provinces) of one or another empire. There is no mention of any “Palestinian” (Arab) nation anywhere until about middle of 20th century.

             About Deir Yassin – the fiction returns time and again in writing of people who want to convince the world that Jews are bloodthirsty people, not worthy of their own state. But Deir Yassin was a piece of Arab propaganda when the preparation of Arab states for war was in full swing.

             Deir Yassin was not a peaceful village. It was heavily armed containing many Arab fighters. It was a very bloody battle between Jewish forces and Arab forces. Many civilians died in in the crossfire. There were no rapes, and no killing of civilians after the battle. Read about it in this article: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/deir-yassin-the-end-of-a-myth/

             Here is what Arabs said later: “Hazam Nusseibi, who worked for the Palestine Broadcasting Service in 1948, admitted being told by Hussein Khalidi, a Palestinian Arab leader, to fabricate the atrocity claims. Abu Mahmud, a Deir Yassin resident in 1948 told Khalidi “there was no rape,” but Khalidi replied, “We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews.” Nusseibeh told the BBC 50 years later, “This was our biggest mistake. We did not realize how our people would react. As soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror.”

             The aim of the propaganda was to incite the Arab population to hate and fear Jews, compelling women and children to move to safe places abroad, and to get young men to fight Jews. And, interestingly, this one event from 1948 is repeated in every attack on Israel, like yours, but hundreds of genuine massacres of Jews committed by Arabs are ignored.

             Accusations of “ethnic cleansing” in connection with Israel and the Arabs as well as claims that it’s the Jews who are perpetrating it, are totally absurd. The Arab population of the area encompassing Israel, West Bank and Gaza is now many times greater than it was 1948. In contrast, the Jewish population, which lived in Arab lands for millennia, went down from almost a million to almost zero today. So where did the “ethnic cleansing” really happen?

             Life is not fair. Sometimes some people are harmed in order to avoid greater harm to a greater number of people. It’s worth reading what David Ben Gurion said to the United Nation Special Committee in July 1947: “The conscience of humanity ought to weigh this: Where is the balance of justice, where is the greater need, where is the greater peril, where is the lesser evil and where is the lesser injustice?” (http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2020/11/david-ben-gurion-on-moral-argument-of.html)

    2. Then there are the moral issues raised in choosing the starting point and applying current values, monetary and moral, to that point.

       In my country, 1840, the beginning of formal colonisation is the starting point, but since it was preceded by shifting tribal boundaries and 2-3 decades of particularly bloody tribal wars, which took far more lives than the subsequent colonial wars, 1840 as a starting point is good for the pre-colonial victors, not so good for the pre-colonial losers.

    3. Is the Cherokee nation trying to steal your land? If not, I don’t know why you made that comment. Obviously if you bought it, they would respect that sale and be required to do so by law. Had the European settlers and invaders recognised the Cherokee nation and made reasonable treaties with them, there wouldn’t even be this debate.

       And as Malgorzata points out, there are no significant parallels between Native Americans and the Palestinians who were offered their own nation but rejected it. Prior to that the term ‘Palestinian’ referred to all the occupants of the Protectorate — Jews, Muslims, Druze, Christians, etc etc. The subsequent term is a political construct invented in the early 1960s and now used retrospectively as if it’s a historical categorisation to the exclusion of Jews. Worse, it is used specifically to exclude “Palestinian refugees” born in numerous countries from gaining the right to citizenship in their country of birth — a twisted reversal of the concept of indigenous rights.

       1. “Obviously if you bought it, they would respect that sale and be required to do so by law.”

          not if i bought stolen property, which would be the cherokee’s position.

          i see plenty of parallels. there are native americans who rejected reservations and monetary settlements, and still do, for instance. the underlying parallel is coerced ethnic displacement. it occurred via multiple mechanisms both here and in israel, there was a range of tactics, from free willing sales to exploited sales to fraud to violent ethnic cleansing in both histories. both u.s. colonizers and zionist planners wrote of getting rid of the natives/arabs. significance may be in the eye of the beholder, of course.

          1. For reasons best known to yourself, you have turned this discussion into an attack on the history of Israel (grossly distorted by you). Of course you ignore all the other instances of purported “ethnic cleansing” in the world, including the REAL ethnic cleansing of the Jews by the Arabs, since the Arabs expelled all Jews from their lands. How many Jews live in Palestine? None. It’s a capital crime in the Palestinian Territories to sell a Palestinian home to a Jew. How many Arabs live in Israel? Lots–they are citizens.

             It’s curious that you’re putting up post after post about the Jews, when this discussion is about the Dakota. Do you have some other agenda?

12. Acceptance starts with normalizing the conversation.

    By acknowledging the land and history and the treatment First Nations peoples, we start a process. It’s not meant to be virtue signaling/moral preening or an empty statement, it’s the start of dialogue. Will some statements be empty? Yes.

    Will some people be doing the work, even if you don’t see it in their statement of acknowledgement? Also yes.

    1. Well, if you’re sitting on or inhabiting land taken from others, I expect you to preface every comment with a land acknowledgment. Even if it’s empty, some people will be doing the work. Don’t we all need to do this constantly, then?

       1. And it has become more common, and I think people are still working out when it may be appropriate to add. Every statement is too often, but is every public event too often? Should it be when diverse metropolitan communities come together? Internally in companies during events? Alongside other signifiers of national identity like national anthems?

          No one person is directing the effort, it’s individuals and organizations so the use may be all over the place as a new norm coalesces.

          1. Fair enough. But where is that process heading? The process that you say simply voicing these things begins. Is it reconciliation? If so, in what form? Or is it really about restitution….but again, what form?

             The misanthrope in me thinks it’s instead about retribution. I think many will see it that way.

       2. How does this link, if at all, with acknowledgements of slavery & ownership of slaves?

    2. That’s the intention, yes. It’s to take a moment and remember and it’s a way to bring reconciliation into our lives especially where things were not really taught of this nature in school until now. The racist history teacher I had in elementary school read us Brebeuf’s torture to show what “savages” the indigenous people were. That’s what we were taught. This starts to undo that. Allow us to move past everything by starting with knowing the simple truth.

13. I do think land acknowledgements are important for the reasons Diana MacPherson gives–not all are done in lieu of actual support. Without acknowledgement, many people would not even realize to whom the land actually belonged. But words are often an empty bit of hypocrisy, as is most likely the case with K. Tippitt. Thank you so much of reminding us about Grania and repeating some of her wisdom. She is still sorely missed.

    1. “Without acknowledgement, many people would not even realize to whom the land actually belonged.”

       Sometimes the way things are phrased can cause problems.

       The fact of the matter is regardless of who the land used to belong to, it belongs to someone else now. When you start off with the premise that current ownership is not legitimate, you will get nowhere (rightfully so) in any attempt at reconciliation.

       1. The land acknowledgements I read don’t say anything about who owns what.

          1. Don’t they, though? When they say “The On Being Project is located on Dakota land”, that seems to imply that it rightfully belongs to the Dakota people, as opposed to the American people. Or how do you interpret that?

             1. Isn’t that factually accurate? Can’t it be Dakota land and the USA at the same time? The land acknowledgements I’ve seen here say “on the traditional territories”. I think where I live can simultaneously be the “traditional territories” and Canada at the same time just like I can live in the Province of Ontario and Canada at the same time.

14. Personally, I welcome this kind of statement (of Tippett’s). I know the post is a specific response to a known miscreant whose vacuousness and tone have often been commented on the past, but I would not agree that any such statement is hollow unless linked to some form of charitable act.

15. Nope. Can’t criticize either Tippett or her show for failing to offer practical assistance because the website clearly states

    The United States’ land seizures were a project of spiritual destruction that denied the Dakota free and unhindered access to the land that fundamentally shapes their identity and spirituality.

    (bolding mine)

    She’s addressing a spiritual problem with a spiritual solution: positive thoughts and wishes. You can’t argue she’s not qualified for the role.

16. sub

17. “my own ancestors were living in Eastern Europe (soon to be driven out)”

    It’s pretty clear to me that displacement has been going on for a very, very, long time. The history of Europe alone is one of continuous displacement and movement of culture and populations for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. In Asia, the age of Genghis Khan is one of one domination after the other. From that perspective, it looks like this may now, in the 21st century be coming to an end. People are now settled and sensitive to the issue. Morality has developed and advanced. Perhaps some amends for the relatively recent past can be made.

    1. Hardly over – Burma, China, Iraq & Syria, Azerbaijan & Armenia, east Africa, the Amazon…

    2. “The history of Europe alone is one of continuous displacement and movement of culture and populations for tens and hundreds of thousands of years.”

       Indeed. And this is true all over the world – I just read “Guns, Germs and Steel” and learnt about more examples, like the Austronesian expansion.

       We need to address the problems of the present, and while acknowledging the past is a necessary first step, dwelling on it is not helpful.

       My entire family was uprooted by WWII – being German, they either fled or were forced to leave regions where their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years. Regions which had been inhabited by Slavic language speakers before Germans settled there. These, in turn, had arrived only a few hundred years earlier, displacing others.
       In many cases, their homes became a home for other refugees: Poles forced to leave the eastern parts of Poland.
       Germany had, of course, started WWII, thus being responsible not only for the horrors unleashed on other nations, but also for these forced migrations.

       The question is: Why do we manage to live together peacefully now, in a Union with many problems but great advantages as well? In my opinion there are two reasons:

       As the refugees settled, they became well integrated and were economically successful. Their children and grandchildren no longer wished to return to a “homeland” they had never seen. There was no outcry when Germany officially acknowledged its current borders.

       Additionally, while acknowledging and bemoaning the horrors of the past, people did not dwell on them but tried to learn from them. Never again! The younger generation was not responsible for the past, but for the future. They saw past nations and saw people who had suffered – and people with whom they had much in common.

       In my opinion, the main problem in many parts of the world are not the past wrongs as such, but the fact that many people (Native Americans included) still suffer discrimination and economic disadvantages, that many refugees never grew (or were allowed to grow) “new roots”.
       And of course that displacement and oppression are still ongoing processes in many places – as DOM already wrote.

18. Many meetings I attend begin with land acknowledgements. Almost always we also give our pronouns. I am not sure of the value of the land acknowledgment. It is easy for me since I know a fair amount of the history of the valley where I live and the surrounding areas. I know the involvement of my family going back to my great, great grandfather. I don’t always mind doing this because depending on my mood I can introduce some history indicating the complexity of Native American history in the area. I even know the names of some Native American individuals living in SE Utah in the 1850s when white settlers first came to the area.

    Culturally a self introduction varies greatly. The Navajo can introduce them selves in the same way that I would or my white community would. But they have a traditional introduction that includes naming ancestors going back three or four generations. It can take a couple of minutes for two Navajos to make their traditional or formal introductions. The names of the generations often include information about where those families resided. Sometimes this results in connections between people not otherwise known.

    When required to give a pronoun I usually say, “it.” I usually have an explanation ready but since the idea here is to encourage inclusivity it would wrong to deny my own self identification and so I have only been challenged a very few times.

19. When my old academic department asked everybody for their chosen personal pronouns, I replied that after cataract surgery I suddenly discovered that I could now read Russian, and therefore chose мы и наши for my personal pronouns. As a result, a cabal of offended graduate students denounced me for committing a microaggression (or, as I prefer to put it, микроагрессия ). One or more of them also complained about my existence to the HR office.

20. So the Whites (do you mean Anglo-Saxon or Spanish?) took the land by force from the Indians? Well, those Indians were Athabascan Nation, who had taken it by force from the Pueblo Nation tribes — who took it by force from the Folsom Point people, who took it by force from the Clovis Point people, who first settled it some 16,000 years ago. So, quick-quick, let’s find some DNA-provable descendant of the Clovis Point people and give it all to them. One thing I can pretty well guarantee is that said Clovis Point person won’t be Black.

    –Leslie < )O(

    1. Were you replying to my comment at 17 above? The Spanish had little impact where I live. The Ute and Navajo were successful at keeping the Spanish and later the Mexicans from establishing a presence in SE Utah. The history of Native Americans in this area and pretty much the Four Corners area is uncertain. The remains of the Clovis culture can be found in at least two sites in SE Utah. The Puebloan peoples occupied the area in a series of time periods that were not apparently continuous. The Navajo and Ute both arrived in the Four Corners area about the same time. That time period coincided with a mega drought which was displacing the Puebloan culture. The cliff dwelling sites generally date around the end of the ancient Puebloan culture and definitely look like defensive structures. The history is still being pieced together.

       The Navajo claim to have originated in this world in the land they occupy. The Navajo claim to have been guided here by Changing Woman from the dark world. Some sources identify the site of this emergence at the confluence of White Canyon and the Colorado River. The Hopi and Ute peoples do include a migration in their oral histories.

       Since the Ute and Navajo arrived in this area bout the same time and this coincided with the Puebloan people moving to the Rio Grande valley it is as likely there was conflict as that the Puebloans left because of the drought. Since there is no written record we will be dependent on anthropological and archaeological evidence to attempt a history.

       White Anglo-Saxons definitely took the land from Native Americans in the lands surrounding my home. My parents could remember the incident we learned in school as the last “Indian war” when the Mormons in Blanding, UT killed Chief Posey in 1923 after a few years of conflict. The Utes maintain he was poisoned rather than dying from a gunshot wound. The descendants of Chief Posey still live south of my home. My parents were eleven and sixteen years old at the time. It was a big news item at the time. There was even a reporter from the Chicago Tribune covering the incident.

21. Agreed! Here, and in the land of my birth Australia. The infinite regression problem is fatal to all this and it stinks of being the lefty version of “thoughts and prayers” of the right wing nutters which puts my teeth on edge (and makes my dentist richer) every time I hear it.

    Pretty much everywhere on earth was “stolen” and virtue flaunting – while doing utterly nothing for the people – is obnoxious.

    There’s also the question of adverse possession – a legal concept whereby if you occupy property for certain periods (in NY it is I think 7? years against private property, 20 years against the state) …if you occupy, continuously and openly, for those periods you rightfully own it. At that point you have unassailable title to it. Admittedly this is a western legal concept but it works in the real world of history also.

    Further, I’m very much opposed to intergenerational collective guilt, especially when the current parties are mere distant descendants of those whose land was taken or did the taking.

    Should you and I be running back to the Pale of Settlement or Ukraine or Poland or whatever shtetl our ancestors were driven out of and claim it back? Redress today’s wrongs, not those centuries ago.
    ((D.A.,)) J.D.
    NYC

    ps – shouting at the radio is very “old man”. I know b/c I do it. 😉

22. Is ownership not an idea introduced by settlers? Did those peoples who inhabited the land think of it parcelled up like that, & was that that a way the incomers manipulated them into unfair treaties?

23. Yes, indigenous people in North America were treated badly, and their territories were conquered. It was before my time. In fact, it wasn’t even my ancestors who did it. They came from Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But somehow I’m guilty. Reminds me of when I was in religion class as a child (my parents were Catholic). I was told how even though I hadn’t done anything, I had Original Sin because of what some people did a long time ago. This is kind of a weird experience on a website with all atheists.

24. While I find myself agreeing with you less and less often since I starting following you on this site over a decade ago, on this subject we see eye to eye. I live in Saskatchewan, a prairie province in Canada, and many people around here think they’re helping by pointing out they’re “living and [fill in the blank based on profession] on Treaty Four land.” I often think just as you do when I see or hear that : what a bunch of virtue-signaling hypocrites. Are they doing anything else about it? Some, to their credit, are — and my suspicion is that this whole thing might have started because of their genuine efforts to remedy the obstacles and inequality Indigenous people in Canada face. Well, no good deed goes unpunished.

25. I have always had the exact same reaction as Jerry when I heard/read land acknowledgements (and I’m not even American/Canadian). The thread has made me question why I can’t see it as a simple gesture of respect for people who were maltreated. I think it’s because I see the declarations as fake/facile, and not only because they don’t actually give the land back, but because of double standard.

    The people who make land acknowledgements see the migration of Europeans — most of whom were peaceful immigrants, many of them refugees in the current usage of the word — into North America in earlier centuries as a great tragedy infringing the rights and destroying the culture of native Americans. But these same people are usually the ones who think of all modern migrations as a good thing and believe the US and Europe should be places with open borders where everyone who wants can immigrate in large numbers. But Post-Columbian European settlement in the US was essentially not so much different from modern migrations. People from poorer and/or overpopulated areas came to take part of the resources of the continent. That’s what migration almost always is, and it’s happening again today, with the Middle East, South Asia and Africa the source populations who want to come to western and northern Europe or to the US for exactly the same kinds of push and pull factors that brought the Europeans to the US in large numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mass migration, under whatever historic conditions, is always a Janus-faced thing, there are people who profit, and people who are unhappy because they have to share (land or social housing, for example) and because they fear the cultural world they grew up in will be changed or supplanted.

    Quite apart from that, the poverty and bad infrastructure that many native Americans and (even worse) Australian aborigines live in is a disgrace.

26. I have always had the exact same reaction as Jerry when I heard/read land acknowledgements (and I’m not even American/Canadian). The thread has made me question why I can’t see it as a simple gesture of respect for people who were maltreated. I think it’s because I see the declarations as fake/facile, and not only because they don’t actually give the land back, but because of double standard.

    The people who make land acknowledgements see the migration of Europeans — most of whom were peaceful immigrants, many of them refugees in the current usage of the word — into North America in earlier centuries as a great tragedy infringing the rights and destroying the culture of native Americans. But these same people are usually the ones who think of all modern migrations as a good thing and believe the US and Europe should be places with open borders where everyone who wants can immigrate in large numbers. But Post-Columbian European settlement in the US was essentially not so much different from modern migrations. People from poorer and/or overpopulated areas came to take part of the resources of the continent. That’s what migration almost always is, and it’s happening again today, with the Middle East, South Asia and Africa the source populations who want to come to western and northern Europe or to the US for exactly the same kinds of push and pull factors that brought the Europeans to the US in large numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mass migration, under whatever historic conditions, is always a Janus-faced thing, there are people who profit, and people who are unhappy because they have to share (land or social housing, for example) and because they fear the cultural world they grew up in will be changed or supplanted.

    Quite apart from that, the poverty and bad infrastructure that many native Americans and (even worse) Australian aborigines live in is a disgrace and it’s the state’s responsibility to make conditions better. Self goverment or remote location should not be an excuse for depriving these people of high-quality amenities and services other citizens enjoy.

27. The CBC’s Baroness con Sketch:

    https://youtu.be/xlG17C19nYo

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