At events in today’s woker spaces, it has become conventional to start things off by publicly noting that the land where the event is taking place was once inhabited by a certain Native American group (or groups). I’m not a fan of what’s been called Woke 1, but I think the land acknowledgments are wonderful.
Statements often also say that the original inhabitants were parted from their land by treachery, violence and European disease, and also note that their descendants survive and remain stewards of the land.
Events at Yale University, for example, sometimes begin with this acknowledgment:
“Yale University acknowledges that Indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”
I attended an event in Vancouver a few years ago that began with an acknowledgment of several Indigenous groups, including the Squamish and the Musqueam, and the next day encountered outdoors several signs doing the same, including translations into the languages themselves which dazzled me with symbols and diacritics new to me even as a linguist. (Squamish in the language itself is Sḵwx̱wú7mesh.)
Many find these acknowledgments an inauthentic way of genuflecting to injustice without having to actually do anything about it. But institutions often treat the acknowledgments as one of many strategies for supporting the local Indigenous groups. Yale now grants a certificate in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Its Native Northeast Research Collaborative gathers and preserves historical documentation of the Indigenous groups. Its joint project with N.Y.U. supports Native American tribal sovereignty through legal advocacy and educational initiatives.
Yet obviously any efforts can repair only partly. Most of the descendants of the Lenape who originally inhabited Manhattan now live in Oklahoma and Wisconsin (and Ontario), their ancestors having been forcibly relocated there by whites in the 1800s.
But some response is better than none, and to sneer at land acknowledgments as performative nonsense is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
People often put land acknowledgments in the same basket as calling the soft bigotry of low expectations “D.E.I.” and calling for the defunding of the police. But trashing land acknowledgments because of these other woke shibboleths is like dismissing paved roads because the Romans built them but also espoused slavery, sexism and violence as spectacle. “Look at what the Romans were like — no aqueducts for me!”
Land acknowledgments are, or can be, more than a mere reflexive salute to anti-whiteness. Even as a kid, long before High Woke, I used to think about how other people had lived on the Philadelphia land I knew, such as in the woods across the street from my house, and how permanently all of the streets and sidewalks and factories and playgrounds and buildings had erased what those former inhabitants had known, along with their entire way of life.
They felt their land as inherently and eternally theirs in the same way as we do. They couldn’t imagine that one day an alien people would shove them brutally aside as vermin and pave it over, crisscross it with train tracks and run pipes underground and wires overhead, leaving it unrecognizable as what they had known.
My grandmother was a seamstress for a rich white family, who would give their staff a luscious rustic week each summer on their island in Maine. She brought my family along in the summer of 1975. You could drink the lake water, it was so clean and clear. Dinner nightly was big lobsters. All you had to do was dip your rod in the water and you’d be sure to pull up a bass. The cook made splendid blueberry pie with the local berries. The dogs were cute. In our “cottage,” there was for some reason not a piano but an organ; I loved learning how to work it.
The Polaroids of all of this just shine to this day with what a simple, unalloyed joy that week was. Except that late at night, I heard the white staff, always so warm and friendly around us, talking fiercely about the local Native Americans — I’m guessing they were the Passamaquoddy — as if they were less than human.
Later, I participated in a program helping restore Native Americans’ languages to them (Leanne Hinton’s pioneering Breath of Life). For one of the languages, a set of flash cards was one of the only records of its key words, and it had gone missing. They happened to turn up at my house where one of the other assistants had accidentally left them after a gathering. When I gave them back to one of the group’s members, I will never forget her tears and the sincerity of her long hug. These people lost so much, and it still hurts.
Yet all we have is now. The least we can do is, even ritually, express our awareness of the horror of what happened, including acknowledging that the people are still here. If this is woke, it’s the good kind. It feels to me like a right thing to do.
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