Against Land AcknowledgementsStuart Reges
12 Jan 2022
Regular readers of Quillette may recall my 2018 article “Why Women Don’t Code,” which led to another describing how I was “Demoted and Placed on Probation.” After a year of probation, I was reappointed for a three-year term, only to entangle myself in a new controversy over indigenous land acknowledgments. These are sombre declarations intended to acknowledge that land now used for some event or purpose was once inhabited by indigenous tribes (some acknowledgements add that the land was unjustly taken). They are rather like ritual acts of expiatory prayer, usually recited by rote from a standardized text. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not the speaker actually agrees with the sentiments expressed; what’s important is that the required words are spoken.
As Jonathan Kay noted in a 2020 article for Quillette, this convention has been common practice in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada for some time, but has only begun to make an appearance in the US in the last few years. Lately, I have been encountering these land acknowledgments all over the place. One of the slides included in a Title IX training course required of all students, faculty, and staff at the University of Washington reads:
As you begin this course, it is important to spend time acknowledging that many of us learn, live, and work on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people. UW benefits from the careful stewardship of this place from Indigenous people, past, present, and future.
Let us all continue to advocate for Indigenous people and communities as we engage in our lifelong work together as a dynamic and inclusive community of learners, educators, and leaders.
This course will invite you to think about identity and power. We encourage you to think of Indigenous identities throughout.
Title IX is the section of US law that prohibits discrimination based on sex, which has nothing to do with indigenous land issues, as far as I can see.
At first, I just ignored these performative displays—they are faintly annoying and serve no practical purpose, but they struck me as basically harmless. As their appearances become more persistent, however, I began to worry that they represent affirmation of a specific ideology. As such, they constitute a flagrant violation of the institutional neutrality recommended by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report in 1967. The report was prepared by a faculty committee tasked with examining “the University's role in political and social action,” and it affirmed “the University's commitment to the academic freedom of faculty and students in the face of suppression from internal and/or external entities while also insisting on institutional neutrality on political and social issues.”
When I point this out to other faculty, they usually just shrug and say, “Well, I’m not a fan of land acknowledgements, but it’s not a big deal.” This kind of passive acceptance leads to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the “dictatorship of the small minority.” A small but vocal minority cares deeply about an issue, but because others don’t care much either way, the vocal minority ends up imposing its will on everyone else. The more I thought about this, the more it bothered me.
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In December, I sent a message to our faculty mailing list announcing that I planned to append my own version of the land acknowledgement to the syllabus for my winter course. I included the text I had in mind and made it clear that I wanted feedback because I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. Nobody responded. So, when classes started this week, I posted my syllabus with the following declaration under the heading “Indigenous Land Acknowledgment”:
I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/01/12/against-land-acknowledgements/
