Land acknowledgements are tricky.
“We acknowledge and honor that we gather on land sacred to the Ohlone, Esselen, Rumsen, Mutsun and Salinan indigenous peoples and first…
“We acknowledge and honor that we gather on land sacred to the Ohlone, Esselen, Rumsen, Mutsun and Salinan indigenous peoples and first nations. We recognize this not for our own comfort, but to remind us of the need to continue the work to reconcile and repair the harms of oppression and colonization.”
Land acknowledgements are tricky.
On one hand, they function much like the pride flag in our church’s window: “You’re safe here, and we’re trying to do better than our predecessors.”
On the other, they can sound like non-sequitur virtue signaling: “Look! I’m a good liberal! Banana! Lakota!!”
I don’t honestly think it’s possible to reconcile and repair the harms of oppression and colonization, and by stating that as the goal, we sort of prop up the fallacy of a tidy solution to a situation of past and current trauma. I think we can acknowledge the past, and grieve for it, and demand institutional restorative justice, and demand new policies and laws. And we can name the people who have been, and are being harmed.
And maybe we might find a quiet time, amongst friends, to acknowledge the grief we each feel. It’s particularly painful to live on a land stripped of its guardians, as I am made acutely aware each summer, when smoke fills the valleys, and our water runs low. It’s highly doubtful that in my lifetime we will re-integrate the technologies of the indigenous stewards who managed a delicate balance for these fire-prone lands.
So my generation, both indigenous and non, are learning to live with something of nature’s revenge; fires, floods, drought, pests, disease, famine. Oh joy. And we will pass this broken system to our children, a legacy of violence, and of arrogance, and of shame. It feels like the absolute bare minimum to learn this story well, and teach it to them, so that it becomes completely normal to acknowledge the harm that has been caused, and is still being caused. A holocaust stretched over centuries, and repeated around the world.
And in my community we’re just at the stage of learning to correctly pronounce the local tribe’s names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Native_American_tribes_by_state
We are taught, in our studies of oppression and racism, not to center voices from outside the oppressed group. Yet in this situation, we are only able to address the experience from the dominant narrative, as we are quite consciously not handing the burden of our education to our local tribal members. I’ll use myself as example.
I think I was about five when my grandfather first gave me an arrowhead from his backyard. Their house was newly constructed, in a development sitting at the edge of forestland in Eastern Oregon. We found pottery shards, and arrowheads and flat pieces of obsidian, but I didn’t connect those to the angry ghosts I felt there until I was many years older. One Thanksgiving I was trying to fall asleep on a living room couch-it was a full house and I didn’t like sharing a room. As I drifted towards sleep, the image of a man in regalia touched with blue blazed in front of me, and I knew I was very much unwelcome, and on his land.
As a little kid, this was hard to reconcile. The westerns my grandmother watched showed “indians” as an irrational threat, or an impossibly stupid side kick, and the artifacts we found came from another era. There were no live indigenous people in my awareness, despite several reservations within a short drive. The now obvious fact that my grandparents likely built their retirement home on a burial ground just wasn’t within the scope of my sheltered reality, and I reacted as most children do; I thought I had done something very wrong. I spent the rest of my childhood visits there going around the house and property saying little prayers and apologies, first in genuine contrition, and later, after I put the pieces together as a teenager, in a more educated offering.
I can’t undo the existence of my DNA on this continent any more than I can ignore the validity of that ghost’s anger. I am the latest outcome of multiple lines of thieves and trespassers. I don’t have a “back to” to go to, and my continued presence here causes harm. There is no cozy solution.
So for today, I will sit with that discomfort, and I will work on my pronunciation.
And so even through the awkwardness, and glaring insufficiency of land acknowledgements, there’s a glimmer of something better poking through, an acceptance of responsibility to the past, and to the future, which hadn’t before been named. Our worst bumbling attempt is at least better than nothing, and may evolve, eventually, into a deeper understanding.