In land acknowledgments, there is to be found a fatuous mix of nerve and naiveté. The former comes to light in the public pronouncement that some present-day site was once the ancestral homeland of another people and that those currently occupying it and making the pronouncement have absolutely no intention of giving it back. Imagine finding a lost dog, keeping it, and solemnly proclaiming that this dog traditionally belonged to the Thompsons who live down the street. If the people issuing such statements were not so thoroughly neutered, one might say upon hearing a land acknowledgment: that takes balls.
As for the naiveté, land acknowledgments imply that those who previously occupied the land were autochthons who miraculously sprang from the earth. But outside of noble lies and blinkered minds, there are no autochthons. How far back would one have to go to chance upon a virgin land that had not, in a crude manner of speaking, been bled? An acknowledgment, for example, that “the Northwestern [University] campus sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa” may be true, but ignores their role in displacing other tribes (e.g., the Sioux) who themselves no doubt displaced others before them and, moreover, continued to displace others thereafter (consider the displacement—decimation, really—of the Omaha and Poncas at the hands of the Sioux). Even a cursory knowledge of the history of the New World is enough to make clear that America’s indigenous peoples could be just as bloodthirsty and imperialistic as America’s exogenous ones.
Accordingly, land acknowledgments amount to little more than the hollow incantations of a hollow people; insults to injury that vacuously address prior wrongs without doing much of anything to set them right. With restitution off the table, such performative gestures might have merit insofar as they foster a spirit of reconciliation, but it would seem those gestures are as apt to breed resentment as they are reconciliation. To make matters worse, while admissions of wrongdoing can enjoy an expiatory value, land acknowledgments often do more to compound a sense of guilt than alleviate it. Those who engage in these sorts of genuflections generally are more inclined to dwell on and magnify past sins than overcome and move beyond them. One then is left honoring a past that cannot be restored in a present that is not worth honoring. What does that bode for the future?