The land acknowledgement scam
Often virtue signaling and warm-glow feelings motivate such acknowledgements.
Though many people in academia are at least familiar with land acknowledges, few people outside of academia know what they are. A land acknowledgement is, according to Northwestern University, ‘a formal statement that recognizes and respects Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories.’
You find these acknowledgements written on syllabi, email signatures, and memos; or ‘performed’ at sports events, speeches, and public gatherings. Their intent is often unclear, but they are motivated by a sense of injustice and displacement of native tribes who occupied parts of North America for centuries. Some acknowledgments are boilerplate, and read as such. Others are, apparently, meant to be morally restorative: to repair and mitigate damage done by injustice and displacement of the past.
An example comes from the University of Waterloo:
Much of our work at the University of Waterloo takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Work toward reconciliation takes place through research, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within the Office of Indigenous Relations.
Some use land acknowledgement as a partial recompense, and also to explain how they are attempting to repair and to mitigate damage to Native American tribes over past centuries. This is where land acknowledgements are a moral scam. Consider the last sentence of the above land acknowledgment: ‘work toward reconciliation takes place through research, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within the Office of Indigenous Relations.’
The word ‘reconciliation’ is key here. To reconcile is to restore friendly or harmonious relationship between peoples. This is subject to a dilemma: either the native people in question here are still alive, or they are not. If they are not still alive—if their society went extinct—then there cannot be reconciliation. Imagine the oddity of announcing that one had reconciled with their best friend after she had passed away. Barring ghosts or veridical experience from beyond the grave (and a little sarcasm), one cannot reconcile with people long ago deceased unfortunately.
Or, they are still around. In that case, it would be especially hard to establish friendly and harmonious relations with someone whose land you allegedly stole—I say allegedly, because debates over the nature of property rights are fierce and hard to resolve. One could, of course, either return the land to the tribes that occupied to prior, or one could financially compensate these tribes for the value of the land such that they could, if they chose, buy a different piece of land.
To illustrate how morally absurd this is, imagine someone steals your stuff, and then hand pamphlets acknowledging they stole it, while refusing to either give it back or to compensate your for the loss. One would take their acknowledges with a grain of salt, to say the least. If you sincerely believe you have stolen something from someone else, then barring extreme circumstances, you should either return what was stolen, or compensate the wronged owner.
(Then give it back or compensate the owner—or acknowledge that this is more of an exercise in virtue signaling than anything that helps the natives)
Perhaps one may balk at these suggestions. If so, then land acknowledgements are more about virtue signaling and getting a warm fuzzy feeling than they are about grappling with the real difficult ethical problem of trying to figure out what, if anything, North American societies owe to the natives. Until these institutions are willing to actually grapple with this deep, and complicated ethical issue, their land acknowledgements are feel-good scams.