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https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/opinion/native-american-land-acknowledgment.html>
"The guide acknowledged that we were standing on the ancestral homelands of the
Munsee Lenape. He was a careful man in a careful place: the Union Church of
Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller family’s church at the edge of their Kykuit
estate in the Hudson Valley of New York. The morning light on the pews streamed
in through stained-glass windows by Matisse and Chagall. A few people in the
group glanced at me, the Native person in the room, as if to gauge whether what
we’d just heard was acceptable.
“We’d like to think they are looking down on us, pleased with what we have done
with the land,” the guide concluded his acknowledgment.
I thought about pulling him aside afterward, but my patience was low and I
didn’t want to get into it on the first day of a multiday art tour.
He had named the Munsee Lenape, the broader people of the region. But the
particular community of that ground, the Weckquaesgeek, went unmentioned.
Most land acknowledgments don’t end with the suggestion that the displaced are
smiling down from heaven, grateful for what replaced them. But the moment
captured, in exaggerated form, something that can happen even in more careful
versions of the practice. A ritual meant to recognize dispossession becomes a
form of reassurance instead. History is named and then absorbed.
Land acknowledgments became common in museums, universities and cultural
institutions across the United States and Canada, recognizing that they occupy
the ancestral territory of Indigenous nations. Some are now vanishing; Ohio
State banned most land acknowledgments last fall under a state law meant to
reverse diversity, equity and inclusion measures.
The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional
version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country”
can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on,
usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what
non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version
collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a
host’s role.
In 2021, Indigenous anthropologists formally asked the American Anthropological
Association to pause the practice. There was no evidence, they argued, that
acknowledgments produce measurable change.
Because the ritual still treats land as something that can be owned, it names
the theft while leaving the idea of ownership untouched. Indigenous
relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about
reciprocity, care, responsibility. Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist, put it
this way: “The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make
land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the
relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not
ownership.”"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
