After a quick search of my email history, I discovered that it was about 5 years ago when people who work in universities began commonly listing their preferred personal pronouns in email communications and syllabi, a trend which has now rapidly spread across the corporate world and social media.
While the stated purpose of explicitly naming one’s pronouns is to foster inclusion and tolerance, the practice actually performs two unstated functions. The first is to compel compliance from those who might not be willing to cooperate with the increasingly complicated lexicon that grows out of the pronoun wars. The paper trail generated through daily institutional interaction (which frequently indicates preferred pronouns) is used to force dissidents to comply. If you “misgendered” someone and that person wishes to file a formal complaint with the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, it is a great boon for their case if they can prove you were aware of their preferred pronouns by showing email communications where they made their preferences clear to you.
The second unstated purpose of listing one’s pronouns is to signify one’s membership in the priestly castes of university life: those intellectuals who, by mastering a complex vocabulary that eludes the grasp of regular people, demonstrate their superior respect for human dignity and their deeper concern for the many marginalized communities in the racist, fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynous hellscape some people still insist on calling “America.” The ways that this group indicates their status among the clerics of social justice often parallels the performative aspects of religious sacraments. Naming pronouns when introducing oneself takes on a formalized, ritualistic character that is akin to making the sign of the cross at the end of a prayer. It serves to signal one’s profound devotion to a particular way of understanding the world.
Recently, though, the growing banality of naming pronoun preferences has created a problem for the clerisy of academic wokeness: once everyone is identifying their pronouns, doing so can no longer demonstrate your moral and intellectual superiority. Put differently, the common people – non-academics who really don’t have the critical-theoretical perspective to understand the catechisms of the cult to which they unwittingly claim to belong – have stripped away the means by which the true believers of the intelligentsia established their status among the elite. Thus, a new strategy for indicating one’s membership in the priestly class had to be devised.
That new strategy has now arrived on most college campuses, so you can expect to encounter it in Nike’s advertising before too long. Imported from countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where Postcolonial Theory is more prominent than in the US, Weapon X in the rhetorical arms race that pervades academic wokeness has reached American shores: it is called the “Land Acknowledgement Statement.” As was the case with preferred pronouns, examples are most commonly found in formal textual documents that circulate within institutional contexts. Needless to say (to borrow some vocabulary from the woke themselves), the Land Acknowledgement Statements are rather “problematic.”
So, what is a Land Acknowledgement Statement? According to the University of Connecticut’s website, it is “a formal statement that recognizes and respects Native peoples as traditional stewards of lands. The statement highlights the enduring relationship between Native peoples and their traditional territories.” Generally speaking, these statements consist of a few sentences, placed at the top of a university syllabus or read at the beginning of an academic presentation, which “acknowledge” that the land on which the institution sits was once in possession of Native American people, of one tribe or another.
Some examples of these statements are in order, then.
At Queens University, a syllabus for Psychology 251 (Developmental Psychology) begins “Let us acknowledge that Queen’s [University] is situated on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. We are grateful to be able to live, learn and play on these lands. To acknowledge this traditional territory is to recognize its longer history, one predating the establishment of the earliest European colonies. It is also to acknowledge this territory’s significance for the Indigenous Peoples who lived, and continue to live, upon it and whose practices and spiritualities were tied to the land and continue to develop in relationship to the territory and its other inhabitants today.”
At the University of Texas, an Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion invited all faculty to include the following statement on their Engineering (!) syllabi: “I/we would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on Indigenous land. Moreover, I/we would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the Carrizo & Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Tigua Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas, here on Turtle Island.” While the inclusion of the statement remains a “suggestion” for faculty, opting out of such a suggestion from a Dean would certainly raise some eyebrows at any public university today.
We cannot properly understand this new trend without asking why it is suddenly necessary to make such statements. After all, almost everyone already knows that any land in the modern-day United States was probably controlled by Native Americans at some point. This is not new or obscure knowledge. What gives?
The fact that these statements imply a moral duty to acknowledge facts that are already well-known is a primary indicator that the Land Acknowledgement Statements are performing some function beyond merely “acknowledging” land ownership. One covert purpose is to put students on notice as to which worldview and ideology will be privileged in a given course. By immediately drawing an audience’s attention to “historical injustice” in a context of, say, a chemistry class, the instructor signals to students that they are in a space where the politics of grievance will be honored and encouraged. Further, the Land Acknowledgement Statement serves to compel a certain penitential attitude that is a prerequisite for the functioning of “critical pedagogies.” By clarifying that the university is a beneficiary of a program of cultural violence, Land Acknowledgement Statements make it clear to students that they are “complicit” in this legacy of violence and exclusion merely by matriculating at the school in question.
But beyond the ways that these statements enforce a particular politics and preemptively deter classroom dissent, and beyond the fact that they represent a kind of virtue-signaling that marks one’s belonging to the intellectual elite, there are a number of problems with this trend. First, consider how the statement from University of Texas names no fewer than ten tribes before concluding the sentence with an embarrassed “etcetera,” which acknowledges “all the [other] American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands”. The truth of the matter is that any piece of land in the modern-day United States was likely held by various native tribes over the course of the Pre-Columbian era and the early American republic. In other words, we can’t even be sure who needs to be “acknowledged” for the land: much of the information is lost to history. Further, the very fact that any given territory was under the control of various tribes over time indicates that the same strategies that European-Americans used to take these lands from native peoples (war, colonization, broken treaties, buying and selling, etc.) were regularly employed by native peoples themselves prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Even more troubling, though, is the way the Land Acknowledgement Statement imposes decidedly Western, capitalist notions of ownership and property upon Native Americans, who, in many tribes, viewed their relationship with the land in ways that starkly contrast our attitudes today. Around 1885, Crowfoot (Chief of the Blackfeet) explained that “We cannot sell the lives of men and animals; therefore, we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us” (emphasis added).
Massasoit Sachem (leader of the Wampanoag confederacy) is reputed to have asked “What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all.” Similar quotations from other tribes are not difficult to find. Although these ideas were not shared by all tribes, this ambivalence toward private property and a symbiotic relationship with the land are two of the characteristics that academics often cite as proof that the Native Americans’ ethical sensibilities were superior to that of the Euro-Americans, then and now.
Thus, by “acknowledging” the native claims to a piece of land and implying that these claims supersede and negate the claim that modern local and federal governments make upon the territory, the Land Acknowledgement Statements erase the very particularities of Native American cultures that these academics purport to honor and preserve. In short, the non-Native academics speak on behalf of the people whose dignity they claim to uphold: by appropriating the right of those people to speak, they inadvertently inflict the very sort of cultural violence that they profess to abhor. If, as Massasoit said, anything that modern Americans call “property” is “for the use of all,” why, exactly, should anyone be obligated to apologize for using it? The Land Acknowledgement Statements thus rewrite the Native American ethos by defining it in terms of the same values and attitudes that animated the systematic destruction of tribal life by the colonial powers.
On the other hand, Land Acknowledgement Statements create a concerning problem within Western constitutional law. Consider, for example, that the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits the seizure of property from American citizens without warrant. This constitutional protection only extends to legally owned property and, crucially, not stolen property. With every new Land Acknowledgement Statement, an institution reiterates and normalizes the idea that it has no lawful right to maintain that land and, should the right circumstances arise, may find it seized from them unreasonably though legally and without constitutional protection. Notice that Land Acknowledgement Statements therefore carry the profoundly subversive potential to undermine the Fourth Amendment without repealing it and without changing a single word in it. This presents a glaring danger.
The lessons here are twofold. Recall that the primary purpose of these statements is not to do justice to the victims of historical oppression but rather to signify one’s affinity for the performative rituals of academic wokeness. The first lesson, then, is that the intellectual elite who fetishize the tragic stories of marginalized groups in America are less interested in redressing those sufferings than they are using them to maintain their membership in an elite group that is far removed from the plight of the “Other” (as they might say).
The second lesson is a darker one; one that the progressive left would do well to learn. Enamored as they are with the postmodern tradition of critical theory which they name-check when “speaking truth to power,” they miss one of the central insights of postmodern philosophy: that one can never get outside the network of power to speak truth to it. In their enthusiasm for condemning or humbling the entities that they identify as culturally-empowered ones, they forget that any gesture like a “Land Acknowledgement Statement” is itself an exercise of power. Through their attempts to honor the culture of historically-marginalized groups to which they do not belong – trying to create a space for those cultures to speak on their own behalf – they only end up speaking for them. In this way, they reenact the same legacies of privilege and appropriation that they disdain. So much for checking one’s privilege.
38 comments
I would love it if someone could do the same thing in some part of Europe that’s been over-run with migrants. Imagine an event in north London in which there would be an acknowledgement that the event is taking place on the traditional unceded lands of the Catuvallauni and the Middle Saxons.
I’ve noticed this trend in Australia, where I live as a high school student, quickly sped up in popularity over the last 4 years, as well as slowly becoming increasingly insidious towards Marxist ideology. The most recent hearing for me was at my college, where some new staff member introduced herself to my entire cohort, which had a relatively longer land acknowledgement than I’ve heard over the years, the trend was there nevertheless. What was most sinister about this time around is that it demonised capitalism as though on the same moral standing as say racism, I shouldn’t be expected to remember the whole statement, but the most suspicious bit went on the lines of “continued impact of … and capitalism on Australian aborigines and Torres Strait islanders.” Already having the knowledge contributions of James Lindsey to the intellectual and philosophical meanings of woke excommunications and vocabulary, it’s as if they’re virtual signalling to Marxists, which they are blatantly albeit hiding it behind the word mix and flowery of the statement. It makes me wonder if the newest projection to capitalism in Australia (I live in Australia and I don’t see people packed starving in the streets, if you live out in the desert then yes likely – just as I would if I lived out there as an aboriginal) is the testing of their boundaries to see where they can further normalise and push Marxism into my peers. I don’t suspect these statements will neutralise to a reasonable state, I predict these modern admissions to faith will only get more and more sour before something breaks this building wave.
My high school in Australia was doing this at least back in 2013. It became more common as time passed, and more common again when I went to university. At school it was just an acknowledgement of the native people & their “elders past & present”, at University it often involves an acknowledgment that sovereignty was never ceded.
We have friends who attended a play in the Berkshires this summer who told us that the play was preceded by such a land acknowledgement apology. Since last summer, I evaluate all culture and entertainment simply by the aphorism that if something goes woke, let it go broke.
Oh, the deep ironies of woke cultural lack of self- and other-awareness!
Love the idea of the Uni being sued by native Americans for years and years worth of unpaid rent, and present the syllabi to the court as evidence
My city is governed by white guilt and that is why I am running for council. This dropped yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDJRZFinUCs Note land acknowledgement and super somber tone. It is going to take DECADES to dismantle the white supremacy in Olympia government, yet these Paragons are Virtue are running again to help uphold the system. They should all step down as they are complicit.
I am trying to flip the council. https://theolympiatribune.com/movement-to-flip-olympia-city-council-picks-up-steam/ They are destroying my city in real time.
We have had land acknowledgements for about 5 years here. ALL the time, on posters, at comedy shows….I never made the leap to the property argument, but I can see it happening.
One of our councilmembers wants to decolonize both homelessness and trash. NO I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. There is video.
Have you heard of land acknowledgements being done by each person during a meeting, every meeting with the same group of people? This was suggested last night. I really want to say the people of X belonged to the land until the Y tribe killed them for the hunting ground.
I was once in a meeting where it was done. Then, while in the same room a second part of the meeting with new participants as to begin, so the land acknowledgement was done again.
The best one I ever heard was at a Quillette event where indigenous warriors who fought with the british against an american invasion were recognized. As someone with both heritages that felt more inclusive. The reason why schools in Canada do this is to try to follow the calls to action created after the Truth and Reconciliation commission.
I am acknowledging that I have dared to exist upon the tectonic plates and tar pits once owned by Fred and Wilma Flintstone and by Barney and Betty Rubble. May their rich tenured smug descendents gouge out my eyes in genetic penance for my neolithic forebears who colonized Mr. Slate and taught him the imperialism he used to fire Fred from his dinosaur-bulldozer driver job. Bam-bam Rubble! Say his name!
These statements are completely retarded. Native peoples were engaged in constant states of warfare with neighboring groups. They were in non stop competition for resources and executed near constant vendetta style killings based upon previous grievances. Many groups required young men to take the life of another warrior to secure his passage into manhood. When one group gained the upper hand in terms of population and martial strength, they wiped the others out and took the rest as slaves. They may not have understood property in the European sense but they certainly understood group claims to resources within territorial boundaries. People do not change, interactions do not change, the woke are a bunch of self-righteous, fart sniffing, bourgeois, hypocrites. They can take these statements and shove them up their asses.
https://youtu.be/flfy0cxaOTM
Your writing is spicy, very nice read.
How will the wokesters distinguish themselves once everyone is using land acknowledgement statements? Where is Sylvester McMonkey McBean when we need him?
De Tocqueville in Democracy in America wrote in relevant part:
“Although the vast country just described was inhabited by numerous tribes of native peoples, one can justly say that at the time of its discovery it was still no more than a wilderness. The Indians occupied it but did not possess it. It is through agriculture that man takes possession of the soil, and the first inhabitants of North America lived by hunting. Their implacable prejudices, their unbridled passions, their vices, and, perhaps most of all, their savage virtues marked them out for inevitable destruction. The ruin of these tribes began the day that Europeans landed on their shores. It has continued ever since and is even now being carried through to completion. Providence placed these people among the riches of the New World but made their enjoyment brief. They were there, in a sense, only in anticipation. These coasts, so well suited to trade and industry, these rivers so deep, this inexhaustible Mississippi valley, this whole continent, in fact, seemed but an empty cradle awaiting the birth of a great nation. Here civilized men would attempt to build society on new foundations. Applying for the first time theories either previously unknown or deemed inapplicable, they would stage for the world a spectacle for which nothing in the history of the past had prepared it.”
It is a sad state of affairs in American universities when Land Acknowledge Statements are substituted for history
If UofT wanted to be realistic, they need to change the text to: “pay our respects to the Carrizo, who stole the land from the Comecrudo, who drove off the Coahuiltecan, who chased out Caddo, who murdered the Tonkawa residents, who massacred the Comanche, who captured, enslaved and expelled theLipan Apache, who slaughtered the Alabama-Coushatta, who wiped out the Kickapoo, who evicted Tigua Pueblo who wandered onto this land by accident.”
“You can’t attend a performance anymore without first being hectored by a shopworn recording that acknowledges the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe as the original stewards of the land on which the theatres are built. The Festival Theatre’s Executive Director has stated in the local newspaper that “land acknowledgements” are a traditional practise at Indigenous formal gatherings, justifying constant replication in the spirit of being “welcoming” and “inclusive.” Never mind that standard historical works concluded that the dense forests in this area were never occupied territories before Europeans cleared the trees and plowed the fields. There is no evidence they were even Indigenous hunting grounds.
More important, it is difficult to see how today’s remnants of the Huron-Wendat would feel welcomed by a recognition of Haudenosaunee presence in the territory, having been massacred and driven out of southwestern Ontario by them in the 1600s. Nor is it likely that the Haudenosaunee traditionally practised land acknowledgements in favour of the Huron-Wendat who preceded them. The Anishinaabe felt no need to consult with or acknowledge the claims of either people before signing treaties acknowledging British title to the land that was to become Perth County in the early 1800s.”
From https://c2cjournal.ca/2020/11/the-unbearable-wokeness-of-being-in-stratford/
It’s all one big virtue signal. Whether a display of pronouns, a statement acknowledging prior occupants of an area in a condescending manner which continues to usurp agency and autonomy from those people, or a banal post on someone’s social media where they declare the correct opinion, all of this is a type of performative art, a massive virtue signal to declare membership in a club or having the right ideas. It will never end, now, either.
I decided to go back and look through my syllabi out of curiosity (I graduated in 2019 with Bio and Psych degrees in Canada). It was easy to predict which lecturers included Land Acknowledgements, and where, within the curriculum. The ones with a more ideological bend in the Psych department included it at the top, immediately below the contact information; others either didn’t include it at all (mostly those in the Bio departments), or only included a truncated version tucked away at the end of the syllabus (more common in Psych). It was something I had picked up while still studying, but never really understood its purpose beyond the performativity of it all.
I should correct my above comment to state that these were Treaty acknowledgements (specifically Treaty 6), which I do consider a little more substantial than general ‘Land Acknowledgements’.
In regards to the land acknowledgement from governments and academic institutions;
look to the UN ; UNDRIP
https://en.unesco.org/indigenous-peoples/undrip
FWIW – takings law, government seizure of your property for public use, comes out of the 5th Amendment. The 4th Amendment relates to the issuing of warrants and seizure of personal effects in an arrest. Property disputes are typically settled in local (common law) courts and this is generally the same in all common law countries. That law is based mostly on chain of title and/or recent use. Most “squatter’s rights” claims refer to use that’s “deliberate, continuous, notorious, and without permission.” and define a period of 10 years or more. If what just happened in Oklahoma doesn’t wind up being a problem for property rights I can’t see the traditional ownership statement being a problem in that regard. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other problems with it much of which you’ve already addressed.
Great to see an academic so wise to woke, who cuts through their crap so easily. I’ll be back for more, thanks.
When one of these Pin-Heads, basking in the effulgent glow of their Self-Awarded Moral Superiority, tries to
draw you into their Made Up Pronoun game in an email, respond to them in a way that does not use ANY pronouns. It REALLY Pisses them Off; but, there is not a damned thing they can do about it ! 😉
Yep, I could really see this working in Hungary. ‘We acknowledge we are illegally squatting on land that was conquered by the Illyrians, then the Celts, then the Romans, then the Huns, then the Gepids, then the Avars, then the Franks, etc. etc.”
Orban will tell these people to FO.
Ditto almost any non-Anglosphere nation.
Even if they find Chauvin guilty they will riot if he s no sentenced to death. The police who have testified have done their best to try and throw him under the bus to save their asses, but it won’t work with the Wokistas.
I’ve not followed the case at all but I can’t imagine any scenario in which the organizers won’t call for a riot. It’s kind of what they do.
I invite anyone who wishes to use Indian reverence for the land to visit Rosebud or Pine Ridge Reservation in SD. There is no reverence for the land there. Not even the slightest bit of reverence.
In Australia part of the acknowledgment is to the past and present elders of the land as present spiritually and physically The aim is gain safe access through the land. Traditionally tribes offer there women for sex as a gift of some sort to the tribe whose land they wish to pass through
So, the Universities are offering their women to the natives to exchange sex for the use of the land? Well, that certainly conflicts with the leftists view on sex and campus rape culture.
Excellent piece!
I’m in academia. I’ve always found this statement bizarre, and useless. We have no clue what happened before the Europeans came, and which tribe killed off which other tribe. How many tribes were on the land I stand on? Why are we only acknowledging the winners (the last one)?
I would like to add to my signature something to the effect of:
“I acknowledge that UNIVERSITY-NAME sits on the grounds of CITY-NAME”
Thoughts on how that would work?
Or to put it another way – people who make land acknowledgements, but fail to relinquish their personal property rights , are criminals occupying stolen land that – according to them – they have no right to “own” in the first place. I’ll take these virtue signalers seriously when they legally sign away the deeds to their own homes or private university campuses. Until then, it’s just more woke verbal diarrhea.
“Through their attempts to honor the culture of historically-marginalized groups to which they do not belong – trying to create a space for those cultures to speak on their own behalf – they only end up speaking for them. In this way, they reenact the same legacies of privilege and appropriation that they disdain. ”
Yes, this is what is called a “performative contradiction”,” which the postmodernists engage in every time they say that there is no objective truth — that is, no objective truth except their own statement of the fact of there being none, which somehow does, for them, qualify as an objectively true statement.
In Canada, the woke-tistas also use the phrase, “acknowledge that we are on ‘unceded’ Odawa land” and the like, while standing in urban areas.
Which is false, since land treaties ceding parts of indigenous lands were actually signed between the Canadian government and various tribes starting well over a century ago.
I always want to ask these virtue signalers whether they have paid any property taxes to the tribe whose traditional lands their homes are sitting on. Highly unlikely!
“I am a white settler on treaty ___ land” is common to hear now for introductions in public school meetings for n-th generation white locals living in the city. There is a Nation (what we used to call a “reserve”) on the edge of the city, so in the first meeting I heard this was confusing, thinking it was strange all these white liberals lived on the reserve. A place that despite their virtue-signalling would genuinely despise being.
I wonder how long before the woke use the constant drumbeat of “not your land” combined with “white supremacy”, to start marching through white neighborhoods burning houses down.
I mean if acknowledging where the covid virus came from has caused violence to spring up against Asians, then what kind of violence awaits white people after years of vilification.
During the BLM riots of 2020, this began in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwautosa, a white middle-class suburb. The BLM terrorists began moving through neighborhoods, breaking windows, and destroying cars.
In the period before the current trial ends, I hope that some in Minneapolis are thinking “self-defence groups”, because the coming “not guilty” verdict will lead to many riots and a lot of stolen TVs, as well as destroyed houses.
They’ve already started marching through neighborhoods- did it in DC a few months ago – and you saw what happened in St. Louis with the couple who were charged with gun violations in seeking to defend their homes. But IF (big IF) it comes down to burning homes then we’re in big trouble because there will be significant bloodshed should this happen. That’s actually one of the ‘red lines’ the left should not cross. We’ll see.