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 only be delivered 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.”
Land was taken in many ways, from treaties signed under duress to the day the federal government flooded our bottomlands in North Dakota for the Garrison Dam. In some cases, store owners would extend credit to Native families: a sack of flour, canned beans, survival food. Once Natives were indebted, their land would be taken in exchange. Little of this made the official record; it survived as our histories often have, told across generations. My aunt, Marilyn Youngbird, an elder of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota — my nation, too — heard it from her elders and told me. “The Indian people didn’t understand what was happening,” she said. “The Native people didn’t understand that the land was worth more than the rice, the beans, the flour, the credit. So it was stolen.”
This is the history a land acknowledgment is meant to answer for. When the Barack Obama Presidential Center opened last month, its acknowledgment was thorough. The dedication honored the Anishinaabe and the Council of Three Fires. A permanent display on the campus names nine nations beyond them, refuses the past tense and quotes Mr. Obama on broken treaties and promises. The criticism came anyway, most of it from conservatives who would ridicule any acknowledgment at all. The Center cost $850 million to construct; its museum charges $30 to enter. If you mean it, give it back, the conservatives said. They are not asking in good faith, but they are asking for the right thing. It names the gap between the words and anything the institution is willing to surrender. One side points at that gap to dismiss the whole thing. Native people point at it to ask what comes next.
The attack from the right took a new form this month. A recent 162-page White House report on the Smithsonian faulted museum officials for opening events with land acknowledgments and criticized exhibits describing Native people forced from their homelands. Acknowledgments, it said, are objectionable no matter their wording. Its complaint is that institutions dwell too long on the theft.
Mine is different. Institutions stop exactly where the cost to them would begin.
The fight over land acknowledgments is a fight about words. The right wants them struck; museums and institutions want to keep saying them. A quarrel about language is one an institution can survive. A reckoning with what it owes would be different.
When my aunt and I spoke about what the land actually means to our people, she said: “The earth is our relative. Everything that has passed returns to the earth. We would say ashes to ashes, but ours was blood and body to our soil.”
It’s not about owning the land. It’s about belonging to it.
If “territory” is a Western imposition, then fighting for title means fighting inside the imposition. If title is the only protection the United States actually recognizes, then refusing it on philosophical grounds creates its own kind of vulnerability. That tension is not one I can resolve. Indigenous people live in that contradiction every day; non-Indigenous audiences mostly don’t have to.
I keep thinking about that morning at Pocantico Hills. The guide naming the Munsee Lenape and then, in the same breath, enlisting them to bless the estate built on their displacement. What I haven’t been able to forget are the glances. The people in the room turning, briefly, to read my face, looking for permission or absolution, or maybe just a sign that the moment had been handled.
The people he named are not looking down from anywhere. They are a nation with citizens, a government and a future they’re still negotiating, mostly without the help of estates like the one we were standing on.
They are not pleased with what has been done with the land. They were not asked. The guide was speaking as a host on land where he was, in any honest accounting, the guest.
I’m not ready to throw the practice of land acknowledgments out. The form is too small for what it carries; there’s no way to spell out four centuries of dispossession in two sentences. An acknowledgment that opens a conversation, that involves the tribe, that leads somewhere, is different. But the test isn’t in the words. It’s in what action comes after the words have been spoken.
Reid Walker is a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation and the founder of the Walker Youngbird Foundation. He writes about Indigenous affairs and institutions.
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