The campus of the college where I work was, along with every other built structure on the North American continent, constructed on indigenous land. A few of my more thoughtful and compassionate colleagues have adopted the practice of explicitly acknowledging that fact in various ways, for example by including a blurb below their email signature line, or by giving a brief statement to that effect at the start of important meetings. To the extent this enhances cultural awareness and all of that, this is probably a good thing to do. At the very least, it isn’t a bad thing to do. Nevertheless, I am bothered by it on some level—actually, on several levels.
First, the psychologist in me knows that with continued repetition information you are not required to do something with can quickly lose what little potential impact it may have once had. Think of the complete vacuity of IN GOD WE TRUST that has been scrawled across paper currency since 1957. Or, perhaps a better example, think of when the cashier at the grocery store tells you to “have a nice day.”
Also, written or verbal acknowledgement of a patent historical truth is not a meaningful form of action to begin with. Despite this, there seems to be an implicit assumption that overt recognition of the facts somehow makes a difference. Let’s be clear, acknowledging that the land you are standing on was stolen does absolutely nothing to mitigate the consequences of the theft.
Even worse, it can actually serve as subtle validation of the status quo. And this is particularly disturbing, the fact that this acknowledgement is being offered by people who are at the very same time, as a contractual requirement of their employment in an institution of public higher education, supporting and actively promoting a way of life that has been constructed out of the products of colonization and genocide (two words for variations in intensity of the same thing), slavery (in both its physical and economic forms), and the persistent oppression, exploitation, and immiseration of people everywhere on the planet. There is a troubling ingenuousness lurking here, a latent insincerity that mirrors in nontrivial ways the hidden treachery of the original land treaties themselves.
Of course, I am no different than any of my colleagues when it comes to supporting an exceedingly corrosive way of life through my coerced participation. And I suppose what bothers me the most is that I am unable to sustain the illusion that mere awareness of that fact makes a difference.
