Tuesday, March 21, 2023

"Land Acknowledgements"

Is there any piece of land, anywhere on earth, that hasn't been conquered by someone?  Morally, should we all live in Africa, from whence the human race emerged?

Land acknowledgements are a silly performance and a waste of time:

"If it becomes routine, or worse yet, is strictly performative, then it has no meaning at all," said Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and undersecretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian Institution. "It goes in one ear and out the other." (Gover said only one or two Smithsonian museums have land acknowledgments; the National Museum of the American Indian is among those that do, and its acknowledgment is only one sentence long.)

Gover said the statements — which first appeared in Australia back in the 1970s in the push for Aboriginal peoples' rights and more recently blossomed in Canada with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, which brought to light how generations of Indigenous schoolchildren had been stripped of their native languages and cultural traditions — can also feel disempowering to the very people they're supposed to uplift.

"If I hear a land acknowledgment, part of what I'm hearing is, 'There used to be Indians here. But now they're gone. Isn't that a shame?' And I don't wish to be made to feel that way," Gover said.

But other Indigenous experts say land acknowledgments do have value. If people are thinking about how they go about crafting and using these statements, they can provide a first step toward action.

They're also a slap in the face.  Essentially what they say is, "Someone else used to live here but we own this land now, and we're not giving it back."  If you're not going to give the land back, your so-called land acknowledgement is hollow as well as insulting.  Lefties love these kinds of do-nothing performances, these backhanded shows of support, that have the effect of keeping minorities in their place.

2 comments:

  1. "If you can't defend it, it's not yours." - History

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  2. One of the richest women in Oklahoma was a native American who happened to sit on a massive oil reserve. Since it's on a reservation, nobody can take it. Be very careful trying to demand back land after you've marked it as worthless.

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