Walker: Please Don’t Thank Us for the Land

2026/07/27 Leave a comment

On the words and actions:

…This is the history a land acknowledgment is meant to answer for. When the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened last month, its acknowledgment was thorough. The dedication honored the Anishinaabe and the Council of Three Fires. A permanent display on the campus names nine nations beyond them, refuses the past tense and quotes Mr. Obama on broken treaties and promises. The criticism came anyway, most of it from conservatives who would ridicule any acknowledgment at all. The Center cost $850 million to construct; its museum charges $30 to enter. If you mean it, give it back, the conservatives said. They are not asking in good faith, but they are asking for the right thing. It names the gap between the words and anything the institution is willing to surrender. One side points at that gap to dismiss the whole thing. Native people point at it to ask what comes next.

The attack from the right took a new form this month. A recent 162-page White House report on the Smithsonian faulted museum officials for opening events with land acknowledgments and criticized exhibits describing Native people forced from their homelands. Acknowledgments, it said, are objectionable no matter their wording. Its complaint is that institutions dwell too long on the theft.

Mine is different. Institutions stop exactly where the cost to them would begin.

The fight over land acknowledgments is a fight about words. The right wants them struck; museums and institutions want to keep saying them. A quarrel about language is one an institution can survive. A reckoning with what it owes would be different.

When my aunt and I spoke about what the land actually means to our people, she said: “The earth is our relative. Everything that has passed returns to the earth. We would say ashes to ashes, but ours was blood and body to our soil.”…

I’m not ready to throw the practice of land acknowledgments out. The form is too small for what it carries; there’s no way to spell out four centuries of dispossession in two sentences. An acknowledgment that opens a conversation, that involves the tribe, that leads somewhere, is different. But the test isn’t in the words. It’s in what action comes after the words have been spoken.

Reid Walker is a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.

Source: Please Don’t Thank Us for the Land

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DuVal: Enough With the Land Acknowledgments

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

One USA perspective. Sympathetic as they seem largely performative:

…My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.

Cities, counties and states could share jurisdiction of some of their lands and projects to tribes and work as partners. The Covid-19 virus hit reservations particularly hard in the early months of the pandemic, but because in the past few decades many tribes took over the management of their public health systems from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, many tribal governments ultimately had better outcomes than neighboring non-Native-majority counties. Tribes already partner with the federal government in areas such as land and resource management, marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and cleaning up Superfund sites. Rather than mourn the past through land acknowledgments, institutions should expand these more practical efforts and work with modern Native nations as true partners.

Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author, most recently, of “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.”

Source: Enough With the Land Acknowledgments

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