The Trouble With Land Acknowledgments: A More Honest History

Beyond virtue signaling: Why genuine reconciliation requires acknowledging the messy, violent, and shared human history of Turtle Island

Image by ivabalk from Pixabay

There’s an interesting ritual offered by the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee bands of southern Canada called the Dish With One Spoon, in which they acknowledge they both have a right to the land, (the ‘dish’), and the one spoon with which they both feed from it. They agree to take only what they need and clean the dish for others. It’s a responsibility-centered covenant with which they bury ancient grievances, and agree not to let the nastiness from before happen again. Which involved an awful lot of warfare and land-seizing back in the day and a helluva lot of abuse by the Haudenosaunee against many others.

The Haudenosaunee pretty much went all European on their neighbors, but today, there are no ‘land claims’ by the descendants of the conquered against the descendants of the conquerors.

While there are Indigenous groups that offer their own land acknowledgments, the formulaics require deference for doing what almost every culture of humans has done at some point: Migrate to another place that sucks less than yours, and clear out anyone who gets in your face.

Still, migrants often co-existed with contemporary neighbors via trade networks and fluid territorial use on a continent where ‘property rights’ were much fuzzier than they are today. The modern white land acknowledgment is loosely rooted in traditional North American Indigenous practices of acknowledging the host nation when visiting neighboring territories. Rituals included ceremonial greetings, diplomatic speeches before gatherings, and gift exchanges for permission to travel or settle.

All perfectly respectful.

But the land acknowledgments developed in the late-20th, early 21st centuries have less to do with respect for earlier inhabitants or ‘burying the hatchet’ than forcing ‘white oppressor’ self-flagellation. The newer intent differs from those offered by one Indigenous group to another, even when the land was acquired by brute force. Indigenous groups offer political histories of their battles and massacres when they meet in peace today, and recognition that ‘your people lived here, then our people lived here;’ somewhat more sterile than the white versions, which carry a subtle scent of public rebuke.

The current ritual recitations, one can’t help but suspect, allow privileged progressives to shake their virtuous peacock feathers in others’ faces while not having to lift a talon to actually do anything for modern Indigenous groups, many of whom still live in gross poverty, only partially due to their displacement history.*

Hypocrisy comes into play when the Indy-Indy land acknowledgements view the newcomers/conquerors/colonizers as the ‘current face of the land’, a/k/a the now-stewards. Unlike the descendants of white Europeans today who are now being held responsible in court for occupying land they’re apparently not ‘the current face of’.

The other history of abuse of Indigenous people

The land acknowledgement’s higher purpose, for white people anyway, is to recognize the rights of Native peoples and to de-legitimize the injustices done to them. But Europeans weren’t uniquely racist, violent or genocidal. With a very few extremely isolated exceptions, North America’s original inhabitants were anything but. Globally and historically, humans exhibit, and always have, every single pathology now attributed in certain circles only as the ownership of white Europeans and their descendants: Rape, mass rape, torture, massacre, cannibalism, slavery, tribalism (the ancient equivalent of ‘racism’), looting, land acquisition and genocide. In fact, raiding, which is historically documented around the world, resulted in extremely high murder rates. Sometimes it wiped out entire communities. Genocide, before it was uncool.

It wasn’t Shakespearean mass slaughter 24/7, but Indigenous migrant settlement wasn’t necessarily paper-shuffling and rubber-stamping, either. Like everywhere else, violence within groups and against others fluctuated by region and time period, with long stretches of peace in some places, and some tribes noteworthy for their aggressive violence: The Sioux, the Apache, and the Haudenosaunee (who we’ll get to in greater detail shortly), just to cite a few examples.

Up in the Arctic, the Copper Inuit (or ‘Eskimo’, as anthropology professor and author Lawrence Keeley called them), were cited as an example of a culture that, “experienced a high level of feuding and homicide before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police suppressed it….Other Eskimo of the high arctic who were organized into small bands also fit this pattern.” The Netsilik Inuits’ murder rate, he noted, was noticeably high in comparison to modern times, even after the Mounties cracked down on interband feuding.**

Some true histories of Native colonizing and land appropriation

In order for Canadian society, at least, to achieve genuine ‘truth and reconciliation’, we all need to acknowledge that humans are far more similar than they are different, especially when it comes to the basis of all wars: Taking other peoples’ stuff, and that it’s ‘colonization’ when one people come to live on other people’s land, regardless of what their SPF sunblock level is.

Let’s examine two of the best-documented histories of Indigenous people acting rather a lot like European colonizers: Starting with the Haudenosaunee merger and acquisition (or ‘stealing’ as progressive parlance calls it) of traditional Huron land on which I’m living now—southern Ontario.

After the seventeenth-century Beaver Wars, the defeated Huron-Wendat gave up their land to enemies who either killed, assimilated or displaced them. Sound familiar? It was an aggressive expansionist campaign by the Haudenosaunee that succeeded, although the Wendat population had already been greatly devastated by contact with European diseases.

To be fair, the wars were driven partially by European influence. The Beaver Wars began with increased demand for beaver pelts which were the oil economy of the day. The Haudenosaunee exhausted their own supply, which necessitated pushing into Huron-Wendat territory where you could get all the beaver you wanted. It was an aggressive push which resulted in destroyed villages, with the current residents sometimes adopted, others scattered, and many fleeing to Quebec. The rest were creatively killed, sometimes involving a sloooooow effort involving burning, cutting or beating, and, if you were a Big Name Chief, the ritual consumption of your corpse to consume your strength, but also to show contempt for your weakness in getting captured and subjected to this, you little wuss.

Victory was aided with the addition of British-provided firearms, and as we all know, the Great Spirit is always on the side with the most flintlock muskets.

When the Haudenosaunee offer a land acknowledgment today, they reference the Huron-Wendat as the ‘original peoples’ of the land, rather a lot the way white ‘slightly less original peoples’ do, and this somehow reconciles the two without much fussing and agitating over who killed who and how, nor do they go to court over it.

“Money, it's a crime Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie Money, so they say Is the root of all evil today” - Pink Floyd

Meanwhile, down South of what lay beyond what would one day be known as the 49th Parallel….

Firearms access from the French aided the Ojibwe in the late 17th and 18th centuries when they expanded into Dakota Sioux territory who had already displaced the Crow, Cheyenne, and others unfortunate enough to live where the Dakota wanted to go. That, too, was shaped by European forces but it wasn’t much different from life before the palefaces. Archaeologists still don’t know who was responsible for expediting the 14th-century Crow Creek Massacre in what is now South Dakota, except that it wasn’t Europeans.

Archaeology has unearthed many examples of pre-Columbian restless and acquisitive Natives: fortifications against enemies in places like the Mississippi Valley, and in the Southwest, in what is now New Mexico. The ancestors of today’s ‘Puebloans’ there,, who were formerly known as the Anasazi in the thirteenth century, engaged in attacks on their neighbors including mass killings and mutilations. ‘Anasazi’ is a Navajo term the Navs created for this group, meaning ‘ancient enemies’ or ‘enemy ancestors’. They changed their name to distance themselves from their well-named ancestors the way Philip Morris changed its name to Altria to escape their legally-established reputation for killing their customers.

European contact didn’t introduce Indigenous violence, it reshaped it.

This is just a hair-thin sliver of the Indigenous history violence not just of the people who lived on Turtle Island before the Europeans divided it up into states, provinces, territories, and viciously disputed voting districts, but that of nearly every single human community and culture anywhere in the world.

Canadians today deal with endless land claims by Indigenous groups who may or may not have ‘stolen’ the land from those who lived there before they themselves were displaced. They sue the Crown rather than each other because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that the Court has the ability to decide these claims, and no one wants that! We certainly should feel badly for the way our ancestors treated theirs, but why not do a Dish With One Spoon Ritual with the Canadian government, and its weary taxpayers?

Only against non-Indigenous is past conquest a neverending legal battle rather than a fait accompli.

Human history narratives are dishonest when they detail a story that only speaks to a fraction of human experience, and don’t hold the (genuine) victims of past violence accountable for that which they inflicted on others in extremely nasty ways.

Violent Indigenous histories do involve numerous social, economic, and historical complications and pressures, pre-Columbian and post-, that also sound resoundingly modern: Trade disputes and wars; climate pressures; famine; replacing low populations by capturing others for breeding purposes. Bands, tribes, and nations also sought their own strategic dominance just as human societies continue to do. And if European torture and hideous executions were bad, they were pretty gawdawful here on Turtle Island, too. God help you if you were captured by the Comanches. Who, by the way, drove the Apaches off their land, but they don’t offer land acknowledgments; instead, today, they offer straightforward oral histories.

The more one delves into the history of pre-Columbian cultures, the more one recognizes the need for Indigenous peoples to reconcile the truth with their established anthropological, archaeologically-supported, and equally shameful histories. Or stop expecting the rest of us to self-flagellate.

Given this history, should there be such a thing as permanent historical entitlement?

Land acknowledgments for all

Real history is messy, shameful, and far less flattering than mythologies—or ‘oral histories’—pretend. Today’s white land acknowledgements are mostly a moral caricature which harm rather than help the truth and reconciliation debate.

But moral claims are not enshrined in amber; they must be perpetually renegotiated as societies, and humans, evolve.

Not all Indigenous support this pandering anyway, and know they can’t always blame the white folks or the government for their troubles. Many Canadian Indigenous ask hard questions of their own people about where the millions in reparative tax money is going and has gone. They complain to the government, and although there’s an existing financial act that mandates bands must account for the money they’re given, it was partially repealed, and the government stopped enforcing compliance, so poverty remains while others prosper.

Indigenous North Americans’ histories, and their current plights, are far more complicated than land acknowledgments and other intellectual frippery offer, with band responsibility denied for and to Indigenous. Activists offer, instead, a vacuous ‘historical grievances’ brick wall that perpetuates, rather than solves, never-ending Native problems, aided by band leaders who don’t have to explain where the money went.

Indy2Indy land acknowledgements never address land claims, which can literally drag out for decades in this country. Only we are expected to offer reparations.

Integrity-driven land acknowledgments should reflect everyone’s shared responsibility for changing that which is in our power.

Honesty surrounding Indigenous violence doesn’t exonerate European atrocities. But it reinvigorates history and reduces prejudice, on both sides, by acknowledging we have more in common than we know.

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Frances Widdowson, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation)*Source: Keeley, 1996, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage).

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