Walker: Please Don’t Thank Us for the Land

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