Like all Oregon schoolchildren, I learned the state song "Oregon, my Oregon" in third grade. It begins:
"Land of the Empire Builders
Land of the Golden West
Conquered and held by free men
Fairest and the best."
In recent decades these words make people uncomfortable. It is nicer to think that the indigenous people here welcomed White settlers, so they weren't conquered, just outnumbered. And "free men" reminds people that Oregon took an anti-slavery position in 1859; the state constitution forbade Black people to live in the state -- not so good. And "fairest" meant Whitest, not the most committed to equal justice.
The problem with the song isn't that it is wrong. It is that it was all too true, and an embarrassment.
I find arrowheads on my farm on tilled land after a rain. The shiny obsidian bits glisten. Indigenous people lived here before gold miners and farmers began arriving after 1850. The Rogue River provided salmon; the native oak savannah provided acorns. White settlers clashed with Indians, with surprise attacks and retaliatory attacks. There were more White settlers and soldiers than local Indians, and they were better provisioned. The surviving Indians were moved 200 miles to the north, which ended the Rogue River Indian Wars of 1855-56. Ugly history.
In 1883 my great-grandfather bought 180 acres of that fought-over land from a man who acquired it under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. This Act was an effort by the U.S. government to encourage settlement of the Oregon Territory, which is to say White settlement. It gave 320 acres to every unmarried White male -- and 640 acres to a husband and wife -- if they settled on and farmed the land. The land was fertile and farmable, so people came.
Public meetings in recent years have been offering up "land acknowledgement statements." Here is a sample, suggested by a guide to these statements:
"We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants─past, present, and emerging─as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters. We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma."
I wish people would not do these statements, although I suspect no one wants to be the one to suggest it to a group of well-meaning conscientious people. So I will be the one.
They do more harm than good. They feed the narrative that over-educated guilty White liberals hate America, and are doing virtue performance theater with no real practical intent to do anything. The statements are a critique of the very process that built the country -- westward expansion. Every American has a basis for feeling that he or she, too, deserves recognition for an injustice. Blacks for slavery and Jim Crow; Jews for antisemitism; Irish immigrants for discrimination; Catholics for the Ku Klux Klan; German immigrants for discrimination during World War I; the Japanese for internment in World War II; Chinese for the Exclusion Act, women for centuries of second class citizenship. It doesn't stop. Everyone through their ancestry has been an oppressor and oppressed. Today White male millionaires and billionaires feel aggrieved. They know they pay more taxes and at a higher marginal rate than do others. They consider themselves the Atlas, carrying the world, amid the 47% who are "takers."
Land acknowledgment statements sentimentalize an idealized past that never existed. Humans have been conquering and replacing each other since the beginning of time. The records are scarce here in Southern Oregon but a variety of tribes overlap and struggled and displaced one another. Modoc. Takelma. Siletz. Latgawa. Klamath. Chinook. Shasta.
Fight over turf continues to this day. The Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Indians and the Coquille Tribe are rivals over who has local "hunting rights", now in the modern form of the right to build a casino in Medford to profit off local gamblers.There is no original owner to acknowledge. The land has been conquered by war, by disease, and by disproportionate fertility, again and again. The land is "conquered and held" until a new conquerer comes along. It is the bloody reality of human history.
The history of Poland for the past 2000 years is better recorded than is the history of indigenous people at my farm, and it makes my point.
From 100 to 400 Current Era, that land was settled by people from the west, by Germanic people. Then the Huns. Then the Avars. Then the Magyars. Then the Vikings. Then the Bohemians. Then the Mongols. Then the Swedes. Then the Austrians, Germans, and Russians. In the 20th Century, the Germans and Russians divided it, occupied it, and committed genocide on it.
To whom would a land acknowledgement be made in Poland? To whom should we make it in Southern Oregon?
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18 comments:
My daughter has a surprisingly high percentage of Scandinavia genes even though it would have been more likely to be Greek and English. She has some Irish heritage and those Viking raiders occupied Ireland for a bit. I’m guessing they weren’t welcomed initially but they became family at some point. We are all related to a degree if you go back far enough as there was a genetic bottleneck of humans maybe 150,000 years ago.
Borders are still changing today. Eastern Oregon wants to join Idaho. Ukraine will be chopped-up as part of any settlement with Russia. Turkey is getting ready to invade Syria, and Syria will be chopped-up. China is getting ready to invade and conquer Taiwan. There are never-ending border changes. It's the battle of the fittest. What will America look like in 100 years?
Could "fairest" in the state song refer not to light hair and skin--there were plenty of dark haired, or swarthy Euro settlers--but to the supposedly best-looking, or most pleasing in aspect? Hardly mutually exclusive from (Snow?) white as, or if intended, but not quite synonymous either.
Agreed, the land acknowledgement statements are moralizing, ahistorical platitudes, the other side of the same coin from a whitewashed Manifest Destiny. If anything, they patronizingly cast Native tribes as contented, doe-eyed pacifists dancing with animals in peace and harmony.
The warmongering Comanches would beg to differ, e.g., as would the mass-enslaving, religious human-sacrificing, imperialist Aztecs. But didn't even their forebears came over the land bridge from Asia? Could the acknowledgement go to the Clovis culture? Maybe they ousted someone too....
The problem with land acknowledgment statements is that they are often performed rotely and without feeling, like an often repeated liturgy which has lost all meaning. My ancestors, the Vikings, brutalize all of Europe and half of Asia. We’re all guilty.
The idea of the “noble savage” is a myth, likely created to assuage our guilt. Savagery is never noble and history is written by the conquerors. At base, mankind is made up of beasts.
Mayhaps this post is prompted by the fact that you have new neighbors looking down on you from above?
https://kobi5.com/news/siletz-tribe-regains-ownership-of-table-rock-homelands-in-southern-oregon-260347/
I don't know about Poland, in particular. Of course people have been at war with one another since time began, but land acknowledgements don't deny that. The point of land acknowledgements is to address white supremacy in a pluralistic society. We have to overcome white supremacy if we, as a nation, expect to long endure. Reasonable minds can differ on the wording of land acknowledgements, and when and when not to use them; but acknowledging history from a non-white perspective is an important sign of progress in these United States. Land acknowledgements, provocative as they seem to be (based on comments I read, they bother a lot of people), provide a non-white perspective.
Woke nonsense like these "land acknowledgments" is a big part of how liberals have alienated the working class.
I guess if you go back far enough, we are all related to some hominins in East Africa on the Equator, all of which were black. We still have most of those genes.
Wow. The whole blog sounds like white privilege. They conquered them and they conquered them others . And all got slaughtered, the way of the world.
So move on. Kind of like watching our bombs blow the children of Gaza to little pieces and saying they asked for it. No guilt needed. The way of the world. The Cow creek have bought back 63,000 acres and “OUR” LOCALS are buying the old reservation “internment” camp by Table Rock. So cool. What goes round comes round. Sure makes me feel good.
How do these statements affect you?
They don't.
Just like transgender people in sports. They don't affect you, either.
Land Acknowledgement Statements wouldn’t make up for the colonists’ treatment of indigenous peoples any more than payments to descendants of slaves could make up for their treatment, but perhaps it might help rectify some of our whitewashed history. Incredibly, we now have descendants of the white colonists and slaveholders whining about being the oppressed.
The best thing we could do to atone for the sins of our fathers would be, as Lincoln said, to dedicate ourselves to our ideals: that all people are created equal and have equal rights to liberty and justice for all. Of course, that would require us to abide by certain basic principles such as acceptance of election outcomes and adherence to the rule of law, something Republicans have proven unwilling to do.
But the Israelis asked for it on October 7, let’s make that quite clear. History, privilege, agency, and the current moral high ground is about correctly denominating pre-certified oppressors and oppressed, via duly politicized categories.
Warning to LD: A comment page is a poor place for irony or sarcasm or parody. It is even a poor place for subordinate clauses that precede a "but." Even the smart people who read this blog read quickly and take literally things meant in jest.
I resent this ad hominin remark.
The children of Gaza didn’t ask for anything. Hamas asked for them by choosing to use them as human shields.
“ dedicate ourselves to our ideals: that all people are created equal and have equal rights to liberty and justice for all”
Nice sentiment that I totally agree with. Now all we have to do is get rid of all of the DEI policies that discriminate against white people (and especially white males) in the name of “equity“, which is the current cloaking mechanism for the racial quota system that liberals want to impose.
If we had come closer to achieving our ideals and all people were on a little more equal footing, we wouldn't need affirmative action. But White privilege remains the order of the day and clinging to it an objective of the MAGA Party.
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