My town is so angry that apparently, no Native American tribe ever lived here. We’re surrounded by mountains and I think it was just too much work to get here with the rest of the area much more accessible. We ran a huge historical and archeological effort to find any reference to our town or any artefacts. Nada. So we still went with the land acknowledgement. We did discover that there was a tribe in Westchester County NY that claimed all the land everywhere or something like that, and we used that to say we stole their land (Westchester is in a different state and a four hour drive from here).
But it gets much weirder. That tribe was moved to a reservation in Wisconsin, and our local college invited them to set up an office here to study native american rights. And then our town council had a brilliant idea. We now hand all our town proposals and legislation to the Native American office for their review and comments before we vote on them. These indigenous people must think we are complete idiots, and they wouldn’t be wrong.
One underrated dimension of this IMO is that it's by no means obvious that "acknowledging" an immoral situation is by default the right orientation to take to the illicit or immoral action. The crass example I use is like — imagine someone insisting upon a practice of I Banged Your Wife Acknowledgement, ~every time the two encountered each other or in large public spaces or whatever. It would feel almost sociopathic to fixate upon this at this level, and if anything to exacerbate rather than remedy the situation.
There is a Magic card we made back in the day called Reparations whose flavor text is "Sorry we burned down your village. Here's some gold." Land acknowledgements are like that, but without the "...here's some gold." The whole thing is just 'hey so we did this bad thing and feel bad about it but not bad enough to do anything or make any sacrifices, so instead we're going to attempt to ameliorate our own guilt at your expense.' It's really just very very insidious.
Noah, while your economic perspective on land utility is incisive, your characterization of Indigenous sovereignty feels like a profound oversimplification that ignores the legal reality of nation-to-nation relations.
You argue that land acknowledgments are "morally indistinguishable from the worst blood-and-soil nationalism of the racist far Right," and that they advance a theory of "collective racial ownership of territory." Yet, by reducing centuries of complex treaty law, political identity, and specific jurisdictional disputes to "blood-and-soil" rhetoric, you strip the topic of its legal nuance. You claim, "The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again," framing indigenous land rights as nothing more than a property dispute—as if the U.S. government’s historical and current legal obligations are merely about who "saw" the land first. Of the 400+ legal agreement between our government and those of First Nations, historian Vince Deloria notes that 0 have been honored. Illegal?
Furthermore, when you suggest that "'Decolonization' of the land of the U.S. would likely be an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests," you construct an alarmist binary that forces a false choice: either support the status quo, or support mass expulsion. That strikes me as a straw man that avoids the actual, practical conversations happening within tribes today about resource management, treaty rights, and governance.
As a career educator in history and economics—and a registered political independent—I find this framing lacking. I’d be genuinely fascinated to see you open the floor to the First Nations people in your readership. How do they reconcile your classification of their sovereignty claims as "ethnonationalism" with their own lived historical reality, where sovereignty is not a matter of "race," but of defined political status and government-to-government agreements? I find land acknowledgments cringy for some of the reasons you note [they are highly performative in my view] and a product of a cultural moment we’re gladly moving through, but wow, this seems oddly illiberal and historically naive.
When you first posted this, I pointed out that there is no theory in there of how to get actual rights to Native Americans.
In 2020, McGirt vs. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled in a majority opinion from Judge Gorsuch, that held that the domain reserved for the Muscogee Nation by Congress in the 19th century has never been disestablished and constitutes Indian country for the purposes of the Major Crimes Act, meaning that the state of Oklahoma has no right to prosecute American Indians for crimes allegedly committed therein. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals applied the McGirt rationale to rule nine other Indigenous nations had not been disestablished. As a result, almost the entirety of the eastern half of what is now the state of Oklahoma remains Indian country, meaning that criminal prosecutions of Native Americans for offenses therein falls outside the jurisdiction of Oklahoma’s court system.
To quote Gorsuch on the case, who I don't like, as he starts by paraphrasing the Plaintiffs making a similar argument to Noah Smith
“Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye.... ...We reject that thinking, unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.”
Now, beyond the basic legal and moral argument that these treaties were legal treaties and they shouldn't be broken, there is a meta argument.
No Supreme Court Justice in say 1950 would have treated Native American treaties as anything other than toilet paper. Native Americans were the villains in Westerns, a sad people, vanishing from America and right to vanish.
It would take the Native occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, writers like Sherman Alexie, and cultural productions like land acknowledgements to bring Americans at large, including Conservative Supreme Court Justices, to the widespread acceptance that lots of Native American land was illegally expropriated.
Noah Smith here has no theory of change for how we get from "the villainous savages in John Wayne movies who have no recognized rights" to "legally recognized and protected sovereign nations under US suzerainty"
It just happened magically.
Are land acknowledgements the best way to raise popular consciousness? Certainly debatable.
But was a mass cultural shift to get Americans to recognize the base MORAL injustice of Indian removal required for Native Americans to get their LEGAL rights recognized?
Are you trying to say that land acknowledgements played a role in the attitudinal shift you mention? That makes no sense, because the shift happened before land acknowledgments became a thing.
Rather, land acknowledgements are a a result of the broad change in attitudes. They're an example of progressives taking a good thing too far while, as Noah points out, ignoring the logical conclusion of their own arguments.
We don't need to "get actual rights to Native Americans" because they already have all the rights of US citizens, plus apparently being immune from prosecution by the state of Oklahoma.
Native Americans only became citizens in 1924. Before that point, while they theoretically had rights, in practicality, they didn't. Even after citizenship, they were treated very badly and had difficulty securing even their actual enumerated legal rights.
What is now Oklahoma was legally designated as Indian Country until 1890. The entire legal basis of the Trail of Tears was that the tribes forcibly displaced from the East would get land west of the Mississippi. That was what the McGirt decision is about. The state of Oklahoma was established in 1906, but the native ownership of Eastern Oklahoma had not been legally removed. De facto, white settlers had just came in and ganked all the land that they could, and they ran the new state. If a Native American objected, well, that's what shotguns were for.
This was what Gorsuch and the Supreme court majority was objecting to.
Oklahoma's argument, as a state, was, "Look, Oklahoma the state has been practicing de facto judicial power over all of the people in this territory. Sure, it wasn't technically legal, but since we've been doing it for so long.... I mean... just ignore the treaties. It would be inconvenient."
Steal something, shoot everyone who objects, keep doing this for 100 years, it's now yours.
That is how it often works in many places worldwide, but it isn't actually a legal principle in a country of laws.
"Steal something, shoot everyone who objects, keep doing this for 100 years, it's now yours."
Funny how you self-hating liberals only seem to have a problem with this when white people do it, but not the claims of the "native" Americans that are based on precisely the same grounds.
A key plank of the piece that we are all commenting on is, "The world’s evolution from one based on ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest to one based on fixed borders and institutions is something to celebrate — and something we must fight to preserve."
Native American claims are much more varied. The Comanches, the various Sioux tribes, and many on the plains engaged in wide scale warfare with the arrival of horses in the 1500s. There were a lot of displacements and battles between Native tribes. The Pueblo Wars are a good instance of this.
That said, those in the American Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, didn't really do that. They have been in the same place for a while.
The problem with the history of the US and Native Americans is that the US said to the various tribes, "We are bringing you into a world of fixed borders and institutions."
Now, many tribes didn't like that and fought, but plenty of them saw which way the wind was blowing and said, "Fine." They signed treaties, went to reservations, and tried to be be in a world of fixed borders and institutions. The Cherokee, for example, invented a written language, set up courts in the American style, engaged in Western style agriculture, and were making an excellent transition to a society of fixed borders and institutions.
BUT
Whether or not they acquiesced to fixed borders and institutions, the Native Americans generally received "ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest." from other Americans, which the Federal government actively supported or, at best, ignored.
Lots of liberals object to other instances of ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest by non white peoples, the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1951. The annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco.
Michael I agree that some sort of cultural shift has happened, and Gorsuch may be a product of that shift (has he ever read Sherman Alexie? unknown) but land acknowledgments - which are the specific topic of Noah's essay - played no part in changing Gorsuch's mind.
It's funny listening to this "indigenous" discourse as a Brit - over here, the political valence is entirely reversed! The closest we get to this conversation is various right-wing shitheads talking about how various nonwhite people aren't really English (Rishi Sunak being a perennial target for some reason).
Of course, the first few people to cross the land bridge to the Americas should not get to now own the entire continent forever, finders keepers. I stepped on the continent first! Me and all my progeny now own it forever! I like to consider all of the land on Earth to be public land at the start of humanity. Everyone owned an equal share of it, and then later you could sell your public share for a private piece, or buy a private piece from the public. But this is an ideal. We've ended up where we've ended up, and as someone who is more or less utilitarian, you make the best from here, and do what's best for the current people of the world, which means they get to decide how to govern themselves democratically, with fundamental human rights.
Maybe you’re worse off because of your great, great,… ancestors being harmed by some of someone else’s great, great,… ancestors, but that does not make you any more, or less, deserving of aid than someone else who’s just as disadvantaged, but for other reasons, like they were the child of a drug addicted single mother. Aid should be provided based on need, not race or ethnicity. We should do what’s best for the current, living people, however we got here.
And I’m not saying this because my ancestors were privileged in some way. I’m of central and eastern European Jewish descent. My ancestors faced brutal and deadly racism, and were forced to flee from their ancestral homelands. I’m not asking that good people now on those lands who had nothing to do with that leave, or give up property they paid for. Everyone is better off or worse off because of who their parents and ancestors were. Whether it’s because your father was a doctor, or because your ancestors came to a new land. You help those who are in need based on need for whatever reason, and govern to maximize life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is with democracy, human rights, and aid based on need, and only on need. That’s what makes the world of today best.
First I'd heard of "Land Utterances." And in what universe is that mainstream or even Progressive Dem? I mean I'm retired, and read NYT and liberal substacks for hours daily; and/or watch MS-Now, PBS, and other liberal programming on TV, and I've never heard any mention of Land Utterances on any of these programs.
Sure, there's the descendants of various pre-colonial ethnic groups, from Guam to upstate NY, who want reparations of various sorts, justice, and so on, from federal and state governments. Like wanting salmon fishing rights guaranteed by treaty. And Dems are usually the only people who even remotely entertain such demands and requests.
Secondly, if there are ever reparations that include land or payment for land, the situation on Guam is illustrative of the abuses of eminent domain by, in that case, the US military. Who effectively stole something like 68% of the island from its' 100k inhabitants--US citizens btw; reimbursing those dispossessed with pennies on the dollar. I mean I get that American colonialism has been far more gentle than that of other industrial powers. But that doesn't mean we're free of dirt in our past.
"The Democratic National Committee wishes to acknowledge that we gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial. We honor the communities native to this continent, and recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history who have protected our lands, waters, and animals. While we meet in Chicago, we also recognize and honor the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.
We acknowledge the many other tribes who consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten. Democrats continue to support tribes as they advocate for the United States to uphold treaty and trust responsibilities. We applaud that in 2024, under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation became the first federally recognized Tribal Nation in Illinois in 175 years, when the U.S. Department of the Interior placed 130 acres of the Shab-eh-nay reservation in nearby DeKalb County into trust."
It does not say, "The United States government is illegitimate."
It does not say, "The United States is an immoral entity for depriving Native Americans of land."
It does not say, "The various tribes mentioned here have the right to control US policy."
It does not say, "Non Native Americans carry a collective guilt that they must expunged by reparations to Native Americans."
It does say, "Democrats continue to support tribes as they advocate for the United States to uphold treaty and trust responsibilities." which is totally fine.
It also says: 'we are quite willing to annoy you with moral preening in service to one of our interest groups to whom we give special prominence without doing much materially'
it also says: 'we are quite focused on identity'
it also says: 'we're going to lose a lot of winnable elections because we have a tin ear about what shit like this sounds like to most people'
Of course it doesn't say any of those things. But why would I care what progressives say? They are snakes who never say what they are actually thinking because they are extremists who know that it is unpopular. They don't say they want a racial quota system, but that's what you get when you elect them. They don't say they want open borders, but that's what you get. They twist themselves in circles always hinting at things but never coming out and saying it. Their manner of speech alone makes my skin crawl.
Tell us about the racial quota system we got when we elected Democrats.
Tell us about the open borders we got.
And yes, I will call you on it if you cherry pick or ignore context
Half agree with you on the manner of speech. Unlike truly horrific bilge from the likes of Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and DJT it doesn't make my skin crawl, but it does come off as moral preening.
More discussion of the experience in Australia might help. It is apparently routine there and the country has not yet spiraled into a socialist woke hellhole AFAIK, at least according to Australian economist John Quiggin.
From my high school son's class syllabus: (Sorry it's so long, I didn't write it!)
Filipinx Sudies + UW ENGL 131: English
Land Acknowledgement: We live, work, learn and play on the traditional lands of the Duwamish tribe, and pay homage to the Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot peoples, all considered as communities under the Coast Salish. The Coast Salish peoples have and still are protecting their ancestral homelands, land which we benefit from, and have also shaped the ways that we are able to learn. We also acknowledge the mountains, water, plants, animals, and other natural world relations on whose territory we continue to live and work. Throughout this course we will consider our relationships with the lands we are on and our relationship to settler colonialism. We invite the community to also take action and support the movements of the Coast Salish peoples through social or monetary support.
Labor Acknowledgement: Many schools of thought, the culture we live in, and the ways we interact with each other historically come from the Black community, often stolen and appropriated. It is important and necessary to acknowledge that much of what we know of this country today, including its culture, economic growth, and development throughout time has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants who have struggled and resisted against chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and continue to struggle and resist against violence against their communities still happening today. We must also acknowledge the essential workers, such as farmworkers, many of whom are Black and Brown, who have put their lives at risk to provide us with necessities to sustain ourselves and survive a deadly pandemic.
Ethnic Studies would not have happened without the labor and struggles of the Black community, alongside Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. It stems directly from the experiences of specifically Black and Indigenous, often queer, scholars, activists, and storytellers. A critical consciousness is not critical if it ignores Black and Indigenous struggles and movements, nor is it critical if it doesn't center these communities.
Noah, to all these people who talk about indigenous lands I always ask them. “How far back in time do you wanna go” because like you said, the people they think they’re acknowledging the land to probably took it from somebody else.
I really appreciate what you're saying here, especially about the folly of blood-and-soil ethnonationalism. One question: I see how giving chunks of cities to tribal authorities makes more logistical sense than vague "land back" demands but I don't see how its logical premise is any different.
In Michigan, land acknowledgements often forget two of the three tribes that ceded land to the United States, the Anishinaabe, Wyandot and Menominee. Only the Anishinaabe are usually meantioned. I do think it is helpful to remind folks of their treaty rights, but that isn't how most folks think of them. BTW, the tribes have been very helpful in Michigan with environmentalists fighting the Line 5 pipeline and trying to restore our native fisheries and other wildlife conservation efforts!
My town is so angry that apparently, no Native American tribe ever lived here. We’re surrounded by mountains and I think it was just too much work to get here with the rest of the area much more accessible. We ran a huge historical and archeological effort to find any reference to our town or any artefacts. Nada. So we still went with the land acknowledgement. We did discover that there was a tribe in Westchester County NY that claimed all the land everywhere or something like that, and we used that to say we stole their land (Westchester is in a different state and a four hour drive from here).
But it gets much weirder. That tribe was moved to a reservation in Wisconsin, and our local college invited them to set up an office here to study native american rights. And then our town council had a brilliant idea. We now hand all our town proposals and legislation to the Native American office for their review and comments before we vote on them. These indigenous people must think we are complete idiots, and they wouldn’t be wrong.
One underrated dimension of this IMO is that it's by no means obvious that "acknowledging" an immoral situation is by default the right orientation to take to the illicit or immoral action. The crass example I use is like — imagine someone insisting upon a practice of I Banged Your Wife Acknowledgement, ~every time the two encountered each other or in large public spaces or whatever. It would feel almost sociopathic to fixate upon this at this level, and if anything to exacerbate rather than remedy the situation.
There is a Magic card we made back in the day called Reparations whose flavor text is "Sorry we burned down your village. Here's some gold." Land acknowledgements are like that, but without the "...here's some gold." The whole thing is just 'hey so we did this bad thing and feel bad about it but not bad enough to do anything or make any sacrifices, so instead we're going to attempt to ameliorate our own guilt at your expense.' It's really just very very insidious.
Indeed. I think that whole dynamic is what was being mocked in the land acknowledgments sketch by Baroness von Sketch: https://broadview.org/baroness-von-sketch-land-acknowledgment/
The second-to-last group to steal the land has dibs forever.
Noah, while your economic perspective on land utility is incisive, your characterization of Indigenous sovereignty feels like a profound oversimplification that ignores the legal reality of nation-to-nation relations.
You argue that land acknowledgments are "morally indistinguishable from the worst blood-and-soil nationalism of the racist far Right," and that they advance a theory of "collective racial ownership of territory." Yet, by reducing centuries of complex treaty law, political identity, and specific jurisdictional disputes to "blood-and-soil" rhetoric, you strip the topic of its legal nuance. You claim, "The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again," framing indigenous land rights as nothing more than a property dispute—as if the U.S. government’s historical and current legal obligations are merely about who "saw" the land first. Of the 400+ legal agreement between our government and those of First Nations, historian Vince Deloria notes that 0 have been honored. Illegal?
Furthermore, when you suggest that "'Decolonization' of the land of the U.S. would likely be an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests," you construct an alarmist binary that forces a false choice: either support the status quo, or support mass expulsion. That strikes me as a straw man that avoids the actual, practical conversations happening within tribes today about resource management, treaty rights, and governance.
As a career educator in history and economics—and a registered political independent—I find this framing lacking. I’d be genuinely fascinated to see you open the floor to the First Nations people in your readership. How do they reconcile your classification of their sovereignty claims as "ethnonationalism" with their own lived historical reality, where sovereignty is not a matter of "race," but of defined political status and government-to-government agreements? I find land acknowledgments cringy for some of the reasons you note [they are highly performative in my view] and a product of a cultural moment we’re gladly moving through, but wow, this seems oddly illiberal and historically naive.
"
How do they reconcile your classification of their sovereignty claims as "ethnonationalism
"
I honestly don't care.
That history was a long time ago. Time to move on
Fair enough. It was long ago when the treaties were broken. None of us were alive then sooo we cant change that either.
from A fellow lover of pets who prioritizes thusly 🐮🤠🙌🏼🐰and writes about related matters at The Equanomist
PS 🐇🐰🐇🐰 how was the little patients medical experience today @noahpinion...
When you first posted this, I pointed out that there is no theory in there of how to get actual rights to Native Americans.
In 2020, McGirt vs. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled in a majority opinion from Judge Gorsuch, that held that the domain reserved for the Muscogee Nation by Congress in the 19th century has never been disestablished and constitutes Indian country for the purposes of the Major Crimes Act, meaning that the state of Oklahoma has no right to prosecute American Indians for crimes allegedly committed therein. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals applied the McGirt rationale to rule nine other Indigenous nations had not been disestablished. As a result, almost the entirety of the eastern half of what is now the state of Oklahoma remains Indian country, meaning that criminal prosecutions of Native Americans for offenses therein falls outside the jurisdiction of Oklahoma’s court system.
To quote Gorsuch on the case, who I don't like, as he starts by paraphrasing the Plaintiffs making a similar argument to Noah Smith
“Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye.... ...We reject that thinking, unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.”
Now, beyond the basic legal and moral argument that these treaties were legal treaties and they shouldn't be broken, there is a meta argument.
No Supreme Court Justice in say 1950 would have treated Native American treaties as anything other than toilet paper. Native Americans were the villains in Westerns, a sad people, vanishing from America and right to vanish.
It would take the Native occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, writers like Sherman Alexie, and cultural productions like land acknowledgements to bring Americans at large, including Conservative Supreme Court Justices, to the widespread acceptance that lots of Native American land was illegally expropriated.
Noah Smith here has no theory of change for how we get from "the villainous savages in John Wayne movies who have no recognized rights" to "legally recognized and protected sovereign nations under US suzerainty"
It just happened magically.
Are land acknowledgements the best way to raise popular consciousness? Certainly debatable.
But was a mass cultural shift to get Americans to recognize the base MORAL injustice of Indian removal required for Native Americans to get their LEGAL rights recognized?
Yes.
Are you trying to say that land acknowledgements played a role in the attitudinal shift you mention? That makes no sense, because the shift happened before land acknowledgments became a thing.
Rather, land acknowledgements are a a result of the broad change in attitudes. They're an example of progressives taking a good thing too far while, as Noah points out, ignoring the logical conclusion of their own arguments.
We don't need to "get actual rights to Native Americans" because they already have all the rights of US citizens, plus apparently being immune from prosecution by the state of Oklahoma.
Native Americans only became citizens in 1924. Before that point, while they theoretically had rights, in practicality, they didn't. Even after citizenship, they were treated very badly and had difficulty securing even their actual enumerated legal rights.
What is now Oklahoma was legally designated as Indian Country until 1890. The entire legal basis of the Trail of Tears was that the tribes forcibly displaced from the East would get land west of the Mississippi. That was what the McGirt decision is about. The state of Oklahoma was established in 1906, but the native ownership of Eastern Oklahoma had not been legally removed. De facto, white settlers had just came in and ganked all the land that they could, and they ran the new state. If a Native American objected, well, that's what shotguns were for.
This was what Gorsuch and the Supreme court majority was objecting to.
Oklahoma's argument, as a state, was, "Look, Oklahoma the state has been practicing de facto judicial power over all of the people in this territory. Sure, it wasn't technically legal, but since we've been doing it for so long.... I mean... just ignore the treaties. It would be inconvenient."
Steal something, shoot everyone who objects, keep doing this for 100 years, it's now yours.
That is how it often works in many places worldwide, but it isn't actually a legal principle in a country of laws.
"Steal something, shoot everyone who objects, keep doing this for 100 years, it's now yours."
Funny how you self-hating liberals only seem to have a problem with this when white people do it, but not the claims of the "native" Americans that are based on precisely the same grounds.
A key plank of the piece that we are all commenting on is, "The world’s evolution from one based on ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest to one based on fixed borders and institutions is something to celebrate — and something we must fight to preserve."
Native American claims are much more varied. The Comanches, the various Sioux tribes, and many on the plains engaged in wide scale warfare with the arrival of horses in the 1500s. There were a lot of displacements and battles between Native tribes. The Pueblo Wars are a good instance of this.
That said, those in the American Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, didn't really do that. They have been in the same place for a while.
The problem with the history of the US and Native Americans is that the US said to the various tribes, "We are bringing you into a world of fixed borders and institutions."
Now, many tribes didn't like that and fought, but plenty of them saw which way the wind was blowing and said, "Fine." They signed treaties, went to reservations, and tried to be be in a world of fixed borders and institutions. The Cherokee, for example, invented a written language, set up courts in the American style, engaged in Western style agriculture, and were making an excellent transition to a society of fixed borders and institutions.
BUT
Whether or not they acquiesced to fixed borders and institutions, the Native Americans generally received "ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest." from other Americans, which the Federal government actively supported or, at best, ignored.
Lots of liberals object to other instances of ethnic cleansing and territorial conquest by non white peoples, the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1951. The annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco.
Michael I agree that some sort of cultural shift has happened, and Gorsuch may be a product of that shift (has he ever read Sherman Alexie? unknown) but land acknowledgments - which are the specific topic of Noah's essay - played no part in changing Gorsuch's mind.
It's funny listening to this "indigenous" discourse as a Brit - over here, the political valence is entirely reversed! The closest we get to this conversation is various right-wing shitheads talking about how various nonwhite people aren't really English (Rishi Sunak being a perennial target for some reason).
Of course, the first few people to cross the land bridge to the Americas should not get to now own the entire continent forever, finders keepers. I stepped on the continent first! Me and all my progeny now own it forever! I like to consider all of the land on Earth to be public land at the start of humanity. Everyone owned an equal share of it, and then later you could sell your public share for a private piece, or buy a private piece from the public. But this is an ideal. We've ended up where we've ended up, and as someone who is more or less utilitarian, you make the best from here, and do what's best for the current people of the world, which means they get to decide how to govern themselves democratically, with fundamental human rights.
Maybe you’re worse off because of your great, great,… ancestors being harmed by some of someone else’s great, great,… ancestors, but that does not make you any more, or less, deserving of aid than someone else who’s just as disadvantaged, but for other reasons, like they were the child of a drug addicted single mother. Aid should be provided based on need, not race or ethnicity. We should do what’s best for the current, living people, however we got here.
And I’m not saying this because my ancestors were privileged in some way. I’m of central and eastern European Jewish descent. My ancestors faced brutal and deadly racism, and were forced to flee from their ancestral homelands. I’m not asking that good people now on those lands who had nothing to do with that leave, or give up property they paid for. Everyone is better off or worse off because of who their parents and ancestors were. Whether it’s because your father was a doctor, or because your ancestors came to a new land. You help those who are in need based on need for whatever reason, and govern to maximize life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is with democracy, human rights, and aid based on need, and only on need. That’s what makes the world of today best.
First I'd heard of "Land Utterances." And in what universe is that mainstream or even Progressive Dem? I mean I'm retired, and read NYT and liberal substacks for hours daily; and/or watch MS-Now, PBS, and other liberal programming on TV, and I've never heard any mention of Land Utterances on any of these programs.
Sure, there's the descendants of various pre-colonial ethnic groups, from Guam to upstate NY, who want reparations of various sorts, justice, and so on, from federal and state governments. Like wanting salmon fishing rights guaranteed by treaty. And Dems are usually the only people who even remotely entertain such demands and requests.
Secondly, if there are ever reparations that include land or payment for land, the situation on Guam is illustrative of the abuses of eminent domain by, in that case, the US military. Who effectively stole something like 68% of the island from its' 100k inhabitants--US citizens btw; reimbursing those dispossessed with pennies on the dollar. I mean I get that American colonialism has been far more gentle than that of other industrial powers. But that doesn't mean we're free of dirt in our past.
In this universe. Tell me what is on the first page of the 2024 Democratic party platform? https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2024-Democratic-Party-Platform.pdf
Quote the actual text.
"The Democratic National Committee wishes to acknowledge that we gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial. We honor the communities native to this continent, and recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history who have protected our lands, waters, and animals. While we meet in Chicago, we also recognize and honor the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.
We acknowledge the many other tribes who consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten. Democrats continue to support tribes as they advocate for the United States to uphold treaty and trust responsibilities. We applaud that in 2024, under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation became the first federally recognized Tribal Nation in Illinois in 175 years, when the U.S. Department of the Interior placed 130 acres of the Shab-eh-nay reservation in nearby DeKalb County into trust."
It does not say, "The United States government is illegitimate."
It does not say, "The United States is an immoral entity for depriving Native Americans of land."
It does not say, "The various tribes mentioned here have the right to control US policy."
It does not say, "Non Native Americans carry a collective guilt that they must expunged by reparations to Native Americans."
It does say, "Democrats continue to support tribes as they advocate for the United States to uphold treaty and trust responsibilities." which is totally fine.
It also says: 'we are quite willing to annoy you with moral preening in service to one of our interest groups to whom we give special prominence without doing much materially'
it also says: 'we are quite focused on identity'
it also says: 'we're going to lose a lot of winnable elections because we have a tin ear about what shit like this sounds like to most people'
it also says: 'we aren't very good at politics'
Of course it doesn't say any of those things. But why would I care what progressives say? They are snakes who never say what they are actually thinking because they are extremists who know that it is unpopular. They don't say they want a racial quota system, but that's what you get when you elect them. They don't say they want open borders, but that's what you get. They twist themselves in circles always hinting at things but never coming out and saying it. Their manner of speech alone makes my skin crawl.
c'mon.
Tell us about the racial quota system we got when we elected Democrats.
Tell us about the open borders we got.
And yes, I will call you on it if you cherry pick or ignore context
Half agree with you on the manner of speech. Unlike truly horrific bilge from the likes of Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and DJT it doesn't make my skin crawl, but it does come off as moral preening.
Excellent article! Hope your bunny's OK!
Data centers too. Indian tribes could use their land for data centers. Way smarter than casinos and surely a ticket to a brighter future.
More discussion of the experience in Australia might help. It is apparently routine there and the country has not yet spiraled into a socialist woke hellhole AFAIK, at least according to Australian economist John Quiggin.
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/time-for-a-land-acknowledgement
Not saying that this wasn't worth a repost, just saying it could be expanded to reflect subsequent commentary.
That's because 90% of the country treat it like a big joke
From my high school son's class syllabus: (Sorry it's so long, I didn't write it!)
Filipinx Sudies + UW ENGL 131: English
Land Acknowledgement: We live, work, learn and play on the traditional lands of the Duwamish tribe, and pay homage to the Suquamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot peoples, all considered as communities under the Coast Salish. The Coast Salish peoples have and still are protecting their ancestral homelands, land which we benefit from, and have also shaped the ways that we are able to learn. We also acknowledge the mountains, water, plants, animals, and other natural world relations on whose territory we continue to live and work. Throughout this course we will consider our relationships with the lands we are on and our relationship to settler colonialism. We invite the community to also take action and support the movements of the Coast Salish peoples through social or monetary support.
Labor Acknowledgement: Many schools of thought, the culture we live in, and the ways we interact with each other historically come from the Black community, often stolen and appropriated. It is important and necessary to acknowledge that much of what we know of this country today, including its culture, economic growth, and development throughout time has been made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants who have struggled and resisted against chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and continue to struggle and resist against violence against their communities still happening today. We must also acknowledge the essential workers, such as farmworkers, many of whom are Black and Brown, who have put their lives at risk to provide us with necessities to sustain ourselves and survive a deadly pandemic.
Ethnic Studies would not have happened without the labor and struggles of the Black community, alongside Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. It stems directly from the experiences of specifically Black and Indigenous, often queer, scholars, activists, and storytellers. A critical consciousness is not critical if it ignores Black and Indigenous struggles and movements, nor is it critical if it doesn't center these communities.
To the extent that they are justified, land acknowledgements should only occur on October 12th. Beyond that, they are a propaganda campaign
Noah, to all these people who talk about indigenous lands I always ask them. “How far back in time do you wanna go” because like you said, the people they think they’re acknowledging the land to probably took it from somebody else.
I really appreciate what you're saying here, especially about the folly of blood-and-soil ethnonationalism. One question: I see how giving chunks of cities to tribal authorities makes more logistical sense than vague "land back" demands but I don't see how its logical premise is any different.
In Michigan, land acknowledgements often forget two of the three tribes that ceded land to the United States, the Anishinaabe, Wyandot and Menominee. Only the Anishinaabe are usually meantioned. I do think it is helpful to remind folks of their treaty rights, but that isn't how most folks think of them. BTW, the tribes have been very helpful in Michigan with environmentalists fighting the Line 5 pipeline and trying to restore our native fisheries and other wildlife conservation efforts!