Land Acknowledgements

 

It seems most public gatherings in Canada now open with a “land acknowledgement.” Here are two that showed up recently in my email, prefacing messages:

“The Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick acknowledges that the land on which we live, work and gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Mi’kmaq Peoples, and we honour the spirit of our ancestors’ Treaties of Peace and Friendship.”

“I respectfully and humbly acknowledge that I live and create on land traditionally inhabited and traversed for centuries by the Piikani, Siksika, Kainai, Tsuut'ina and Nakota peoples, their antecedents and their descendants.”

I understand this is also common in Australia; but not in the US.

I find these “land acknowledgements” offensive and ahistorical. I must always bite my tongue. I fear that, sooner or later, I will myself be forced to read one out, violating my conscience.

They are racist. They assert some special privilege for one racial group over others. That’s especially harmful in a multi-ethnic nation like Canada. They further imply a ruling class, an atistocracy by right of birth. We should all be equal, and advance on merit.

If the point is merely to recall the history of the place, how can they, in the case of New Brunswick, exclude mention of the Acadiens, or the French and British crowns, both of which also declared this their territory at different times.

Is it the claim that the territory was never ceded that makes a difference? 

Granted, the French and British did formally cede their claims to sovereignty by treaty. But so did the indigenous groups: in the same way, by treaty. 

Is the claim that sovereignty was ceded, but not the land itself? That the indigenous groups still  hold property rights, as individual Acadiens might still own their farms under Canadian or British sovereignty? 

But wait. Notice that multiple groups always need to be mentioned. This is because no one aboriginal group had secure possession of any territory; each might pass through. Accordingly, for none of them was it ever “their” land in the legal sense: property ownership requires secure possession, not merely passing through a place, even at regular intervals. Hence the legal doctrine of “squatter’s rights.” 

In fact, the land acknowledgements are inevitably discriminatory among indigenous groups themselves. In the NB acknowledgement, the Passamaquoddy are not mentioned: they too claim NB land as their traditional homeland. There were Iroquois in the Rocky Mountain foothills; yet the Alberta acknowledgement ignores them. Members of almost any tribe might have been almost anywhere at any given time. You can’t tell whom you should name.

Is it about who was here first? We do not know who was here first. All we know is that the named indigenous groups were the ones here at first contact with Europeans. That is an arbitrary point in time. Go back a few centuries further, and we have no idea who was here. We know that indigenous groups moved, expanded, contracted, and disappeared continually. They were, after all, nomadic.

And if being here before some other group establishes special rights or privileges, how does that work for more recent immigrants? Should those of English ancestry be shown similar deference by Italians or Hispanics? And is that second-class or third-class status eternal, generation after generation?

Stop it, Canada.