If you are in higher education you have likely attended a meeting that opened with an Indigenous "land acknowledgement" or "land statement." Indeed, you don't even have to be in a college or university setting to have heard one. These statements seek to honor the Indigenous People upon whose land the gathering is being held and express the awareness that the land was theirs before. In 2020, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade opened with Wampanoag people performing an acknowledgement "honoring people of Native American tribes historically based in the Northeast."
The Land Acknowledgement movement is evolving. And if you are part of an organization or institution that has decided to explore developing an acknowledgement statement, you will quickly find you have opened Pandora's Box. The first question you will ask is, what is the purpose of our creating a statement? Some of the earliest statements now come off as performative optical allyship. Today, it is clear that just issuing a statement is not enough. It must be backed by action. The statement itself must outline concrete ways the organization plans to support Indigenous communities in the future. Otherwise, it has been compared to nothing more than a robber writing a receipt for all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen.
Many times, organizations turn to Indigenous People to help them with this process. This can be fraught with misunderstanding and unintended consequences. Done poorly, it can seem like you are asking them to help you write a thank you note for taking their land. If you want to be a good ally, you have to do better. If you plan to reach out to Indigenous communities you must compensate them fairly. And you should really know why you want to engage an Indigenous Person or Community in the first place, because it is us non-Indigenous People who need to grapple with the issue and truly understand the meaning behind the statement.
For my part, I've been working with a group of people from Chadron State College on creating a land acknowledgement. We have struggled mightily to make sure we do it the right way. We've reached out to Native American friends and colleagues and people in the community and done a great deal of research. My experience has led me to think we are in the early stages of what will be a long era of reckoning and reconciliation, and land acknowledgements will come to be viewed as a tool that helped us non-Indigenous grapple with "Settler Privilege" and not be afraid to have conversations about it. Our group recently presented at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Great Plains Studies annual summit, Reckoning and Reconciliation on the Great Plains: Confronting Our Past, Reimagining Our Future. Our session, In the Shadow of the Sacred: Developing a Lands Statement that Moves Beyond Recognition and Towards Reconciliation, offers a great overview of what we've learned so far. I'll keep you all posted as we move deeper into our work.