Land acknowledgements are a bad idea

Land acknowledgement statements are well-intentioned.

But they are a disastrous idea: bad history, bad patriotism, and very bad politics.

My local university has a prescribed land acknowledgment, with instructions that it is to be read in full and without change. Southern Oregon University's web page on the acknowledgement shows a photo of historic property populated by indigenous people at the time of White settlement in the 1850s: Lower Table Rock. My farm is located just off the right side of this photo, on flat pumice soil where I grow grapes and find arrowheads.

SOU’s Land Acknowledgment: 

We want to take this moment to acknowledge that Southern Oregon University is located within the ancestral homelands of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples who lived here since time immemorial. These Tribes were displaced during rapid Euro-American colonization, the Gold Rush, and armed conflict between 1851 and 1856. In the 1850s, discovery of gold and settlement brought thousands of Euro-Americans to their lands, leading to warfare, epidemics, starvation, and villages being burned. In 1853 the first of several treaties were signed, confederating these Tribes and others together – who would then be referred to as the Rogue River Tribe. These treaties ceded most of their homelands to the United States, and in return they were guaranteed a permanent homeland reserved for them. At the end of the Rogue River Wars in 1856, these Tribes and many other Tribes from western Oregon were removed to the Siletz Reservation and the Grand Ronde Reservation. Today, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians are living descendants of the Takelma, Shasta, and Latgawa peoples of this area. We encourage YOU to learn about the land you reside on, and to join us in advocating for the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous people.

A land acknowledgement has a political purpose central to the politics of the American left. At its political apogee about 2020, the left understood itself to be primarily a coalition of aggrieved people: Blacks, Hispanics, Women, homosexuals, labor union members, immigrants, the disabled, the overweight, the unemployed, the homeless, the poor -- everyone except healthy, prosperous White men. Such a big tent, promising huge and growing majorities. Descendants of people displaced by White settlers were archetypal victims, deserving land acknowledgements and casinos.

Land entitlement due to possession from "time-immemorial" is a sentimental falsehood. The pattern of languages and movement of tribes show that indigenous people in North America did exactly what humans do everywhere and always. They move around and fight over land and resources. They kill and interbreed with their neighbors. We are the descendants of nomads and conquerors. There is no peaceful, settled Eden-like original state of native people anywhere. The tribes listed in the land acknowledgement were fighting among themselves over turf and resources when White people arrived, and are fighting now using the courts to see who gets "dibs" on Southern Oregon gamblers. 

The local tribes were displaced brutally by White settlers and the U.S. Army in the 1850s. They moved in and squatted and broke promises and ignored treaties in order to do it. They continued a time immemorial cycle of movement and demographic change. 

The political left imagines itself to be protectors of the disadvantaged groups in its coalition, and therefore entitled to its members' votes. It is time to rethink this. People are voting like Americans, not like aggrieved members of groups. Democrats are slow to get it: a gay Republican; a labor union Republican; a Hispanic Republican; a Black Republican; a female Republican. How can that be??? Answer: They are Americans.

The land acknowledgement is a profoundly self-destructive message for the political left. It declares there is something uniquely criminal and illegitimate about the origins of America. Shame on you, America! Shame on you Americans!

The land acknowledgment does not celebrate pluralism, democracy or liberal respect and toleration. It is the opposite of the Pledge of Allegiance, with the aspiration of liberty and justice for all.

I don't feel guilty over the behavior of other people's great-great grand-parents, wherever they were. I suspect that few people do. Half my relatives were miserably poor and living in Greece when Southern Oregon was being settled. Others were in Connecticut and fought for the North in the Civil War. The land acknowledgement doesn't come across as informative. It reads like a guilt-trip lecture. I want to look forward with hope, not backward with collective guilt that I do not feel. 

Trump is president in part because he is riding backlash to the left's frame of oppressor and oppressed. A great many people who voted for Trump are disgusted by him, but they voted for him anyway because Democrats seemed even worse. Trump said America was great. Voters heard that. Democrats seem to be saying that America is systematically criminal. Voters hear that, too.

Americans don't feel guilty, not for a past they weren't here to shape. 

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