This is a well reasoned and well written article. The land acknowledgements and the ideology of “decolonization” they represent do not arise from liberal/progressive ideas; they are deeply reactionary, both anti-American and illiberal.
What nonsense. You can't just label whatever crappy ideas of the day that progressives spit out and call them "deeply reactionary" just because you don't like them.
You can't get much more stereotypically progressive than land acknowledgements and decolonization.
It’s reactionary because it’s irredentist, repurposed “blood & soil” ideology with a “progressive” sheen. It’s anti-American & illiberal because it’s an attack on the very legal & political foundations of the United States.
The history of Britain is a good example of why land acknowledgements are questionable - the English are (at least) the fourth wave of settlers - western hunger gatherers were replaced by neolithic farmers, who were replaced by the I do European Bell Beaker people, who either morphed into or were replaced by the Celts, who were then mostly replaced (in the South East) by Anglo saxons. The Vikings left a significant imprint on the north and east, and the current royal family are more or less continuously descended from another conquest by the Normans.
Incidentally, if you ever see "druids" celebrating the solstice at Stonehenge, that's definitely cultural appropriation - Stonehenge was built by the neolithic farmers that the Bell Beakers / Celts replaced.
All the infrastructure is STILL essentially built on the Roman footprint in England, and there's all sorts of other cultural legacies left over from Roman influence. It's wild. Definitely 'colonial' in the sense that America is colonial not just because of settled Europeans but also laws, architecture, infrastructure, culture, or any other system that imposes itself over the indegenous ones.
As I am not british, i was wondering if you could shed some light on ireland's history. I have an american friend who told me he visite Ireland, and he swore to me he could "feel" as soon as he landed that for the first time he was on land that wasn't colonized. And that the people there weren't colonizers like they are here in the states. This seemed like hogwash but I honestly don't know much about Ireland to say.
When I was in Dublin, I stopped by the museum of archaeology, which was well worth visiting. It sounds like the first human populations were around 3000 bc (maybe contemporaneous with Stonehenge) but we don’t know much about the language of those people. Around 500 bc, some iron-using people invaded from mainland Europe, bringing with them the Celtic languages and traditional Celtic ornamentation on jewelry, like knots (though Germanic peoples were also as associated with those decorations back then). About another millennium and a half later, the Anglo-Norman people invaded, bringing the English language. (These people were themselves a mix of multiple layers of Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, and British and Gaulish Celtic people.)
Does your friend think that ancient Irish people evolved from Irish primates, who evolved from Irish fish? Of course it was "colonized". The Azores were "colonized" by Portuguese. But, at the time, there were no living humans in the islands. So, there is no rendering of garments over it.
Ireland wasn't settled by Anglo Saxons, but otherwise I would think it was settled before the Celts got there by Western Hunter gatherers and neolithic farmers, just as mainland Britain was.
Look up the Kingdom of Dublin. Dublin was a Viking colony for over 300 years during the middle ages. Then the Normans (who themselves were Vikings that colonized the coast of France northwest of Paris) came and conquered it from the Vikings. So, yeah, not colonized any more than everywhere else.
The Vikings, incidentally, just *loved* to settle down, intermarry with the daughters of the local muckety mucks, and take up a merchant or craftsman living whenever possible. All the mythology of Valhalla for fallen warriors aside, real life Vikings preferred to die peacefully in their soft warm beds, with wife, kids, and grandkids around them. The Viking warrior and raiding life was hard. Trade was cushy. Humans are going to choose cushy whenever possible.
Am I crazy for never thinking land acknowledgements had anything to do with giving land back? I feel like the premise of this article is reacting to the worst people on Twitter, not the average Braiding Sweetgrass reader.
I've long felt that the best was to honor the Native Americans who used to occupy the land my house sits on is to let myself take up some of their values, to allow assimilation to be a two-way street. If you have land east of the Great Plains and you're maintaining an empty tract of lawn on it, you could stand to be a little less European and a little more like the Native tribe who used to live where you live.
The upside for the average Noahpinion reader is that stopping habitat loss doesn't require degrowth. The ocean of tall grass prairie we thoughtlessly destroyed -- declaring virtually every plant species it contained a "weed" -- can be restored in bits and fragments among densely populated cities and towns.
That's what's happening here in Washtenaw County, where YIMBYs took over Ann Arbor city council. We're buying up empty land and turning it into preserves while rezoning for density and building up. You might think this is just garden variety environmentalism, but it's the definition of "preserve" that matters; fallow land filled with invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle is not helping anyone. We have to value what Native Americans valued: The ecosystem they managed for millennia.
That was the message I sent when I did a land acknowledgement at my wedding. Fifty people sat in my backyard with garden beds on either side filled with native Michigan plants. There is no undoing what was done to indigenous people (regardless of what dummies on Twitter say), but the least we can do is develop a relationship with this land that honors what was here before we arrived.
you're not crazy, the examples Noah actually shows (outside of the Israel/Palestine conflict, where even there I think this is arguable as well though with much more difficulty) don't illustrate any call to physically give land back to some particular ethnicity, expelling the current residents to "go back to where they came from", and his "Should I go to Lithuania?" argument is classic strawman because nobody (not even Tliab, as far as I can google) is calling for that in the US. The ACLU Nebraska post called for no such thing. The examples of Vancouver giving urban land to indigenous tribes as well as your example of land acknowledgement are actually made possible by the change in tone that acknowledges land having been "stolen" in the past. The way we were taught as schoolchildren with "Christopher Columbus discovered America, then something something cowboys-and-Indians, then Thanksgiving!" certainly did not do justice to this reality.
So I think Noah is annoyed by the language and finds it distasteful. Sure I'm annoyed by it as well (which is more of a "me" problem) but if the argument is "Democrats needs to stop using this annoying language or continue to lose elections", that's a very different kind of argument that wasn't made very strongly here if at all, and this language was just as prevalent in 2020 when Democrats won.
I think the sheer prevalence of of land acknowledgments is the issue. It’s one thing to have an occasional land acknowledgement at events and another thing for it to have to be included on every community college course syllabus, at which point it seems like a pointless exercise in virtue signaling.
Teaching the truth about the way the New World was settled is important, though.
But why doesn't it? In simple terms, if you acknowledge stealing something, you should give it back, or at least make those you stole it from financially whole. This is a bedrock principle in all of the Abrahamic faiths (so literally for 1/2 the people in the world.) For a "land acknowledgement" so be an apology it must include repentance of some kind. Absent that, it's not even an apology but a totally empty gesture: sound and fury signifying nothing. And those who engage in it highlight not their moral superiority but their practical cowardice.
There are things in this world that are unforgivable. There are ways in which people who have been wronged cannot be made whole. This is one of those ways. Noah is completely correct that we can't just give them their land back. I am willing to accept that they will never forgive us, but that won't stop me from trying to repair whatever is reparable, and to support work that makes their communities world-class. I absolutely love that they are building high-rises and drawing in investment from major American businesses. And I also want to see the land we took desecrated a little less each year, if we can manage it.
This is the kind of muddy compromise you arrive at when the grievance is this large. There's only so much we can or should do.
I don't accept this. The Danes aren't apologizing for raiding British villages and enslaving thousands of Anglos in the 8th century. The king doesn't ritually apologize for his Norman heritage every 5th of November. The Muslims aren't apologizing for sacking Constantinople.
There are lots of "big grievances" in intl history. If it happened in your lifetime, you can whine. If it happened before you were alive, get over it.
The first step in being better than the average historical human is to stop thinking one's better (or wiser) than the average historical (or contemporary) human.
Call me a snooty inland elite, but I believe Jesus -- an above average historical person -- called on us to recognize the suffering of others. He called on us to be better than people before him. I take his lead, not Mitchell in Oakland's.
Yeah, one doesn’t want to be like the former Yugoslavia, where there’s still lots of hatred due to 500 year-old grievances, occasionally leading to modern genocides…
Managed the ecosystem for millennia? Collectively, they garnered as much from their circumstances as their technology could achieve. They were and are people like us whose various cultures made great sense in their pre-columbian environment. Fantasies about a past of some kind of higher moral meaning helps no one.
I don't think I mentioned some kind of "higher moral meaning." They are known, purely in the realm of facts, to have been much better at land management than we are. They performed controlled burns, allowed wolves to hunt and did some hunting themselves to manage deer populations, and integrated all manner of conservation practices into their cultural beliefs. You would learn a lot of Braiding Sweetgrass, actually!
Sort of true--most pre-European midwestern cultures were quasi-sedentary farmers with quasi-monoculture farming practices (they often had summer/winter permanent settlements), who at the very least burned millions of square miles of forests to create savannah and prairie as their managed hunting lands. Savannah too is especially interesting because it had all been forest and then was selectively managed to increase the hickory and oak yield while reducing total biomass, including reducing availability of game species like deer and elk (though it may have made the hunting easier). Wild rice farming had material impacts on water quality as river banks and lake shores were modified to increase yields. There were literally brands of maize that contemporary researchers use to track trade/diplomatic relations. You're right that they burned forests as well, but that was inherently less frequent, since it was the overburning of forests that basically created the midwestern savannah.
This is all to say that its easy for the celebrants of native culture to make the same intellectual and moral errors European colonists made. We are all just human and have the same tendency to inadvertently fuck up our environment, and just living somewhere for slightly longer doesn't turn you into some Tolkien elf.
This is the exact argument I am trying to make. A form of land management that doesn't lead the the destruction of the ecosystem -- but still may change it -- is what we should strive for and what we have only gotten somewhat better at since the Dustbowl.
Our land management practices were worse on day 1, long before we exceeded their populations. I'm not saying we can run our society exactly like they did; I am saying we have things to learn from them.
Unless you are living in a teepee somewhere, you are obviously not learning very much from them.
Wake up.
The purpose of these land acknowledgements is not to learn from indigenous people and copy their ways. It is to create a sense of Shame among white college-educated people so they can be manipulated better.
I agree with your second sentence. People can all learn from each other -- but (as the world gets more crowded and people become more mobile), that cuts both ways.
Lol, sorry, it's not just you. It's many people who engage on this issue, including Noah assuming that extremists are driving the efforts here.
If you want to challenge your idea of what's "better for humans," read Braiding Sweetgrass. I keep mentioning this book because it's a very influential introduction to native American thinking. We do have things we can learn from them -- which does not mean we should give up our progress or technology.
Ranchers in Kansas perform controlled burns, too. I don't think they have a mystic connection to the ecosystem, and I don't think they needed Native Americans to teach them how to do it. For them, as for the Native Americans, it is a practical action to achieve a specific purpose.
Ah, the myth of the noble savage rears its head again. I’m not Native American, so I don’t know what they think of all this, but I can say that if a bunch of savior-y people started “honoring” me in this way, I’d be pretty offended.
What on earth makes you think that these, quote, indigenous people "valued the ecosystem that they managed for millennia?" They didn't know what an ecosystem was. The (very) different nations of the continent moved around a lot and killed off other nations, and were killed off themselves, and the survivors reconstituted themselves regularly, so "they" (whatever that means) could not have managed anything for millennia even if they had the power to do so. They couldn't damage nature much because there were very few of them and they didn't have the technology to do it.
Anyone has the right to make up anything that has symbolic meaning to them, and your ceremony sounds very poetic and lovely. But let's not confuse it for science or history, and certainly not impose it on others as a test of virtue.
It did occur to me that land acknowledgements would seem much sillier in California than in the Midwest, which I think Noah's take was too Twitter-informed. The destruction of the tall grass prairie -- a biome we've destroyed down to a fraction of a percent of its original size -- is akin to the destruction of the entire rain forest, and when your house is built on that land, the tragedy of our arrival is felt more intimately. At least in my experience, having moved from Phoenix to Michigan several years ago.
Did your neighbors feel the “tragedy of your arrival” when you got to Michigan?
Get over yourself. Feeling shame for what happened centuries ago does not make you a better person.
Focus on doing good deeds that result in betterment for your community. These land acknowledgments are just an excuse for doing nothing and feeling self-righteous about it.
I took action! Prairie restoration is a community-driven movement here in the Midwest that often allies with Native American communities. I am an eager participant. I promise it's not just for guilt and shame.
The fundamental driver of ecological restoration is the genuinely held belief by its participants that this is a very direct human benefit. If insect life declines too severely, we may very well go with them. The nutrient cycle depends heavily on nature keeping its wheels turning.
Israel is a country that is mostly populated by waves of refugees fleeing persecution and violence, as well as their descendants.
We tend to hear about the early Zionists and their explicitly colonial project. That’s real. The critical mass of population that has made Israel’s continued survival actually possible though, was refugees. First from Europe. Then from the Middle East. Then, finally, from the Soviet Union. Quite extreme anti-semitism drove all those people to Israel, rather than any sort of Zionistic colonial quest.
I’m also not a fan of ethnocentrism in general, but it’s not hard to see where Israelis are coming from. I’m also not a fan of war, but I won’t be in favor of America laying down our arms until everyone else does.
Certainly agree very strongly with the last sentence. But Israel's land grabs in the West Bank are absolutely an ongoing colonial project of territorial conquest.
The seizure of the West Bank was intended to create a buffer zone between Israel and a hostile neighboring country against which it had fought two wars. The land could then be traded for peace at some future date.
But the aging leaders of Israel’s then dominant center-left Labor Party government failed to take full measure of a growing, religious-nationalist movement within the country who saw the conquest as an affirmation of their own messianic ideology and themselves as a second generation of Zionist “Pioneers”.
These “settlers” slowly began to build Jewish homesteads on the occupied land. Little was done by the government to dissuade them. When the center-right Revisionist Zionist Likud Party finally toppled the Labor coalition in the late 1970’s, the new government threw its full weight behind settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza. What had been a small but steady trickle of settlers into the occupied territories in the previous decade became a proverbial raging river.
It wasn't just the rise of the Religious Zionist settlement movement, although perhaps such a movement could have been predicted given that the West Bank was "Judea and Samaria", ie the very core of the Jewish states of antiquity. This reminds me a bit of Kosovo/a, whose importance was exaggerated by late 20th century Serbs largely because medieval Serbia had a more southerly center of gravity than modern Serbia.
It was also the fact that the neighboring country ended up being betrayed (in the "Black September" conflict) by the very people who inhabited the captured territory, and thus ended up washing its hands of them.
I agree. The PLO didn’t make things easier for the Palestinians when they attempted a coup against King Hussein that resulted in their expulsion from Jordan by force (“Black September”).
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that the Israeli settlements should never have been permitted. From 1967 onwards, Israel lost much of the international goodwill that had existed since its founding
Still though. I think you oversimplify with “colonial project of territorial conquest”.
When you add in e.g. that it had been Jordan, why Jordan doesn’t want it now, WB Palestinians rejecting peace etc., I just don’t think it’s that simple.
I am critical of Israeli settlement policy in WB but let’s drop the indigenous/colonizer nonsense. Jews have always lived in the WB. There are Arab settlements in Israel there can be Jewish settlements in Palestine. Again, I oppose Israeli govt policy there, but I won’t oversimplify.
So ethnocentrism is bad except in the specific case of Isreal? That is a peculiar stance to take. I support a one state solution, where the inhabitants all have equal rights. In fact, it is the only reasonable and just solution left to the conflict, absent ethnic cleansing by one side or another.
I theoretically agree. But in practice if the inhabitants of the single polity would just immediately decide into civil war or ethnic cleansing of the minority then a single state (in the short term) doesn’t work either. Unfortunately this is a tragic situation without a clean solution. The most recent solution that might have worked would be annexation of Gaza by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan and integration of the those peoples into the relevant states. This was somewhat attempted but rejected by the Palestinians of the loss of their objective for a state (which it was).
The Jordanians did give citizenship to West Bank Palestinians pre-1967, but Gazans have been stateless since 1948: perhaps this difference was because Jordanians (like Palestinians) are Levantine Arabs and are thus similar linguistically and culturally, while Egyptians have a different culture shaped by the Nile, along with their own quite different dialect of Arabic?
This is potentially a good solution but would require displacing 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. This doesn't seem likely, barring some kind of Palestinian military victory, and would perhaps qualify as ethnic cleansing in any case. I don't think Americans realize how there is no contiguous state left for either Palestinian nationhood or even Jordanian annexation. Please tell me more about this effort to return the West Bank to Jordan. I am unaware of it.
With annexation, they could potentially become Israeli citizens. Any "Palestinians" who don't like that solution can leave. Same goes for bigots (among the Jews) who refuse to integrate. That's what it will take for Israel to become a full-fledged (multi-ethnic) liberal democracy. And that's a lesson in statecraft that we Jews must learn, and in which we can (and must) lead the world.
Note that I said "Israel," not "Palestine." There is no plausible Palestinian counterpart to Israel, and neither population truly wants to be partitioned -- while Palestinian nationalism is predicated on refusal to welcome the presence of significant numbers of Jews.
Israel is already a full-fledged, multi-ethnic democracy, which was built by Zionists. They have no intention of importing any Palestinians who are sworn to destroy that. Peace must come *before* any of these bright ideas can be put on the table. And that's in the hands of the Palestinians.
In a full-fledged liberal democracy, "self-determination" is a right that belongs to every INDIVIDUAL -- regardless of ethnicity. I believe in the narrative of Exile and Return, but not in "Jewish nationalism," i.e., ethnocracy, the notion of a "Jewish state."
As per my second paragraph, I don't support Palestinian nationalism, either -- but not all Palestinians are sworn to destroy Jews, and -- given a chance to become full-fledged citizens, not all Palestinians would harbor antipathy toward Israel.
Meanwhile, continued segregation (with its gerrymandered, "side-by-side" ethno-states) can only serve to prolong that antipathy.
I believe that Israel must be a refuge that's safe for Jews, but that needn't require a "Jewish state," any more than the US needs to be a "Christian Republic" in order to be safe for Evangelicals (or a "white people's" state to be safe for Anglo whites).
What we've been witnessing has been a civil war in Eretz Yisrael -- from the river to the sea -- and Israel needs a Lincoln.
PS: Please see my reply to Matthew elsewhere in this discussion (beginning "If Palestinians (Israeli Arabs) are allowed to have permanent homes in Israel, why shouldn't Jews be welcome to have permanent homes in 'Palestine'?" -- and my remarks there about Judah Magnes, which should further clarify my position and my full aspiration for Israel and for my fellow Jews.
Both sides have to want peace and elements of both sides are not interested. The settlers have at least as much to do with the inability of compromise as any other elements. Far more have civilians have been killed in the West Bank by Israelis (mostly settlers or in conflicts instigated by settlers) than visa versa. Israel is fundamentally uninterested in pursuing peace with Palestine and this has been the situation ever since Netanyahu took power.
Just be honest and say you want a Jewish ethnostate. Even if the Palestinians of the West Bank were willing to peacefully integrate into Israel, you would probably refuse on the grounds that it would dilute the Jewish ethnostate.
As you and I have discussed before (in fact it was that discussion that clarified my thinking), yes. History demonstrates that the Jews are *uniquely* vulnerable, and cannot rely on the safeguarding of minority rights offered by multiethnic liberal states. I honestly don't know why that is, but it has been demonstrated to my satisfaction.
(and what evidence would convince you that a one state solution would not work, if Hamas has not been able to?)
70% of non-Orthodox Jews in the US now intermarry with non-Jews. US is quite safe for Jews overall. Just be honest and say you want a Jewish ethnostate to protect the Jewish ethnicity from assimilation.
Do you even live in the US. Have you seen the masked street mobs? The murderous verbal and physical threats? The marking of Jewish spaces? The indifference of the police and other authorities? You’ve got everything but the flames and broken glass going on here.
It is a disgrace on our country that this happens. The only thing to say is that it’s still safer than France or England. Not a high bar to cross.
Yes, that was a good discussion, thank you. All we know about the future is that it won't be like the past. What do you think Israel will look like 100 years from now? I don't believe the current fiction of "occupied territories" is tenable in the long run, though it could last as long as American hegemony.
Mostly? I read that 60% of Jewish people in Israel are Mizrahi Jews who are indigenous to the region. Let’s also not forget about the many Israeli Arabs.
Mostly refugees and mostly from the region too. Yes. There are a lot of mixed Mizrahi / Ashkenazi at this point so I think the higher end figures (e.g. 60% you cite) may include mixed. I’m a little hazy on that. At the end of the day though, I’m very much with Noah and the article here- indigenous land claims are problematic on their face.
It’s kind of ironic that for 1000 years the New Years toast was “next year in Jerusalem” for Jewish people. And amazingly enough, they pulled it off! But now the claim is that indigenous claims are problematic.
The largest group of Mizrahi Jews are North African Jews, who derive much of their ancestry from Sephardic Jews of Spain, who in turn derive most of their ancestry from Roman Italy
One of the goals of the Zionist project, back in the day, was to benefit the local Arabs through their development projects. But the nationalists and the fascists got to the Arabs first.
Palestinians can prove they have surrendered when they can demonstrate they can have responsible leadership that is both willing and able to extirpate the terrorists in their midst. No more payoffs to the families of dead terrorists, no more murderous rhetoric, no more double-talk in Arabic and English, no more maneuvering at the UN to defame and threaten Jews on the world stage. This is table stakes.
The identity obsessed Left and Trump’s right-wing populist movement share three contemptible qualities:
1. They are nihilists who despise America’s liberal traditions & institutions.
2. Both harbor a deep contempt for this country and the mass of its people.
3. They are deeply, almost proudly ignorant of American civics and history, save for cherry-picked “facts” they regurgitate without any consideration of context.
100% agreed. I'm at the point where I just consider blind populism a cancer and instead of leaders leading people these movements just promise everything to everyone. At some point you are doing way more harm than good to your electorate. There is a venn diagram where people on the right and left are overlapping here.
This is a well reasoned and well written article. The land acknowledgements and the ideology of “decolonization” they represent do not arise from liberal/progressive ideas; they are deeply reactionary, both anti-American and illiberal.
What nonsense. You can't just label whatever crappy ideas of the day that progressives spit out and call them "deeply reactionary" just because you don't like them.
You can't get much more stereotypically progressive than land acknowledgements and decolonization.
It’s reactionary because it’s irredentist, repurposed “blood & soil” ideology with a “progressive” sheen. It’s anti-American & illiberal because it’s an attack on the very legal & political foundations of the United States.
The history of Britain is a good example of why land acknowledgements are questionable - the English are (at least) the fourth wave of settlers - western hunger gatherers were replaced by neolithic farmers, who were replaced by the I do European Bell Beaker people, who either morphed into or were replaced by the Celts, who were then mostly replaced (in the South East) by Anglo saxons. The Vikings left a significant imprint on the north and east, and the current royal family are more or less continuously descended from another conquest by the Normans.
Incidentally, if you ever see "druids" celebrating the solstice at Stonehenge, that's definitely cultural appropriation - Stonehenge was built by the neolithic farmers that the Bell Beakers / Celts replaced.
Don't forget the Romans.
Ad I understand it, they left a fairly minimal genetic legacy, unlike the other groups.
All the infrastructure is STILL essentially built on the Roman footprint in England, and there's all sorts of other cultural legacies left over from Roman influence. It's wild. Definitely 'colonial' in the sense that America is colonial not just because of settled Europeans but also laws, architecture, infrastructure, culture, or any other system that imposes itself over the indegenous ones.
The only true English are Morris Dancers.
As I am not british, i was wondering if you could shed some light on ireland's history. I have an american friend who told me he visite Ireland, and he swore to me he could "feel" as soon as he landed that for the first time he was on land that wasn't colonized. And that the people there weren't colonizers like they are here in the states. This seemed like hogwash but I honestly don't know much about Ireland to say.
When I was in Dublin, I stopped by the museum of archaeology, which was well worth visiting. It sounds like the first human populations were around 3000 bc (maybe contemporaneous with Stonehenge) but we don’t know much about the language of those people. Around 500 bc, some iron-using people invaded from mainland Europe, bringing with them the Celtic languages and traditional Celtic ornamentation on jewelry, like knots (though Germanic peoples were also as associated with those decorations back then). About another millennium and a half later, the Anglo-Norman people invaded, bringing the English language. (These people were themselves a mix of multiple layers of Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, and British and Gaulish Celtic people.)
Does your friend think that ancient Irish people evolved from Irish primates, who evolved from Irish fish? Of course it was "colonized". The Azores were "colonized" by Portuguese. But, at the time, there were no living humans in the islands. So, there is no rendering of garments over it.
Ireland wasn't settled by Anglo Saxons, but otherwise I would think it was settled before the Celts got there by Western Hunter gatherers and neolithic farmers, just as mainland Britain was.
Look up the Kingdom of Dublin. Dublin was a Viking colony for over 300 years during the middle ages. Then the Normans (who themselves were Vikings that colonized the coast of France northwest of Paris) came and conquered it from the Vikings. So, yeah, not colonized any more than everywhere else.
The Vikings, incidentally, just *loved* to settle down, intermarry with the daughters of the local muckety mucks, and take up a merchant or craftsman living whenever possible. All the mythology of Valhalla for fallen warriors aside, real life Vikings preferred to die peacefully in their soft warm beds, with wife, kids, and grandkids around them. The Viking warrior and raiding life was hard. Trade was cushy. Humans are going to choose cushy whenever possible.
"Humans are going to choose cushy whenever possible"?
That explains everything! Cardinal Cushing -- of Irish ethnicity -- and also a Primate! ;-)
England totally colonised Ireland! Just look at all the castles owned by English peerage.
Am I crazy for never thinking land acknowledgements had anything to do with giving land back? I feel like the premise of this article is reacting to the worst people on Twitter, not the average Braiding Sweetgrass reader.
I've long felt that the best was to honor the Native Americans who used to occupy the land my house sits on is to let myself take up some of their values, to allow assimilation to be a two-way street. If you have land east of the Great Plains and you're maintaining an empty tract of lawn on it, you could stand to be a little less European and a little more like the Native tribe who used to live where you live.
The upside for the average Noahpinion reader is that stopping habitat loss doesn't require degrowth. The ocean of tall grass prairie we thoughtlessly destroyed -- declaring virtually every plant species it contained a "weed" -- can be restored in bits and fragments among densely populated cities and towns.
That's what's happening here in Washtenaw County, where YIMBYs took over Ann Arbor city council. We're buying up empty land and turning it into preserves while rezoning for density and building up. You might think this is just garden variety environmentalism, but it's the definition of "preserve" that matters; fallow land filled with invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle is not helping anyone. We have to value what Native Americans valued: The ecosystem they managed for millennia.
That was the message I sent when I did a land acknowledgement at my wedding. Fifty people sat in my backyard with garden beds on either side filled with native Michigan plants. There is no undoing what was done to indigenous people (regardless of what dummies on Twitter say), but the least we can do is develop a relationship with this land that honors what was here before we arrived.
you're not crazy, the examples Noah actually shows (outside of the Israel/Palestine conflict, where even there I think this is arguable as well though with much more difficulty) don't illustrate any call to physically give land back to some particular ethnicity, expelling the current residents to "go back to where they came from", and his "Should I go to Lithuania?" argument is classic strawman because nobody (not even Tliab, as far as I can google) is calling for that in the US. The ACLU Nebraska post called for no such thing. The examples of Vancouver giving urban land to indigenous tribes as well as your example of land acknowledgement are actually made possible by the change in tone that acknowledges land having been "stolen" in the past. The way we were taught as schoolchildren with "Christopher Columbus discovered America, then something something cowboys-and-Indians, then Thanksgiving!" certainly did not do justice to this reality.
So I think Noah is annoyed by the language and finds it distasteful. Sure I'm annoyed by it as well (which is more of a "me" problem) but if the argument is "Democrats needs to stop using this annoying language or continue to lose elections", that's a very different kind of argument that wasn't made very strongly here if at all, and this language was just as prevalent in 2020 when Democrats won.
I think the sheer prevalence of of land acknowledgments is the issue. It’s one thing to have an occasional land acknowledgement at events and another thing for it to have to be included on every community college course syllabus, at which point it seems like a pointless exercise in virtue signaling.
Teaching the truth about the way the New World was settled is important, though.
Yeah, I agree, they were a bit of a fad and it was probably too much.
There's too much history being taught! It's making White people uncomforatble.
But why doesn't it? In simple terms, if you acknowledge stealing something, you should give it back, or at least make those you stole it from financially whole. This is a bedrock principle in all of the Abrahamic faiths (so literally for 1/2 the people in the world.) For a "land acknowledgement" so be an apology it must include repentance of some kind. Absent that, it's not even an apology but a totally empty gesture: sound and fury signifying nothing. And those who engage in it highlight not their moral superiority but their practical cowardice.
There are things in this world that are unforgivable. There are ways in which people who have been wronged cannot be made whole. This is one of those ways. Noah is completely correct that we can't just give them their land back. I am willing to accept that they will never forgive us, but that won't stop me from trying to repair whatever is reparable, and to support work that makes their communities world-class. I absolutely love that they are building high-rises and drawing in investment from major American businesses. And I also want to see the land we took desecrated a little less each year, if we can manage it.
This is the kind of muddy compromise you arrive at when the grievance is this large. There's only so much we can or should do.
I don't accept this. The Danes aren't apologizing for raiding British villages and enslaving thousands of Anglos in the 8th century. The king doesn't ritually apologize for his Norman heritage every 5th of November. The Muslims aren't apologizing for sacking Constantinople.
There are lots of "big grievances" in intl history. If it happened in your lifetime, you can whine. If it happened before you were alive, get over it.
I'd like to be better than the average historical human, personally!
The first step in being better than the average historical human is to stop thinking one's better (or wiser) than the average historical (or contemporary) human.
Call me a snooty inland elite, but I believe Jesus -- an above average historical person -- called on us to recognize the suffering of others. He called on us to be better than people before him. I take his lead, not Mitchell in Oakland's.
Yeah, one doesn’t want to be like the former Yugoslavia, where there’s still lots of hatred due to 500 year-old grievances, occasionally leading to modern genocides…
Managed the ecosystem for millennia? Collectively, they garnered as much from their circumstances as their technology could achieve. They were and are people like us whose various cultures made great sense in their pre-columbian environment. Fantasies about a past of some kind of higher moral meaning helps no one.
I don't think I mentioned some kind of "higher moral meaning." They are known, purely in the realm of facts, to have been much better at land management than we are. They performed controlled burns, allowed wolves to hunt and did some hunting themselves to manage deer populations, and integrated all manner of conservation practices into their cultural beliefs. You would learn a lot of Braiding Sweetgrass, actually!
Sort of true--most pre-European midwestern cultures were quasi-sedentary farmers with quasi-monoculture farming practices (they often had summer/winter permanent settlements), who at the very least burned millions of square miles of forests to create savannah and prairie as their managed hunting lands. Savannah too is especially interesting because it had all been forest and then was selectively managed to increase the hickory and oak yield while reducing total biomass, including reducing availability of game species like deer and elk (though it may have made the hunting easier). Wild rice farming had material impacts on water quality as river banks and lake shores were modified to increase yields. There were literally brands of maize that contemporary researchers use to track trade/diplomatic relations. You're right that they burned forests as well, but that was inherently less frequent, since it was the overburning of forests that basically created the midwestern savannah.
This is all to say that its easy for the celebrants of native culture to make the same intellectual and moral errors European colonists made. We are all just human and have the same tendency to inadvertently fuck up our environment, and just living somewhere for slightly longer doesn't turn you into some Tolkien elf.
This is the exact argument I am trying to make. A form of land management that doesn't lead the the destruction of the ecosystem -- but still may change it -- is what we should strive for and what we have only gotten somewhat better at since the Dustbowl.
Their land management practices supported (and only needed to support) much smaller populations.
Our land management practices were worse on day 1, long before we exceeded their populations. I'm not saying we can run our society exactly like they did; I am saying we have things to learn from them.
Unless you are living in a teepee somewhere, you are obviously not learning very much from them.
Wake up.
The purpose of these land acknowledgements is not to learn from indigenous people and copy their ways. It is to create a sense of Shame among white college-educated people so they can be manipulated better.
I agree with your second sentence. People can all learn from each other -- but (as the world gets more crowded and people become more mobile), that cuts both ways.
I don't disagree with that!
No, the United States has been far more effective at using land to create economic value for the masses. It is not even close.
If you believe the purpose of human beings is have no impact on natural resources, then species wide suicide is the only moral stance.
Always with the extremes. Imagine this issue in shades of gray and you'll start to see the point.
"Always with the extremes?" We have never interacted before.
The shades of gray are clear. The USA has objectively done a far better job of managing land for the benefit of humanity than Native Americans.
No one can claim that indigenous people contributed more to humanity than USA. Native American contribution to humanity has been very limited.
Lol, sorry, it's not just you. It's many people who engage on this issue, including Noah assuming that extremists are driving the efforts here.
If you want to challenge your idea of what's "better for humans," read Braiding Sweetgrass. I keep mentioning this book because it's a very influential introduction to native American thinking. We do have things we can learn from them -- which does not mean we should give up our progress or technology.
Ranchers in Kansas perform controlled burns, too. I don't think they have a mystic connection to the ecosystem, and I don't think they needed Native Americans to teach them how to do it. For them, as for the Native Americans, it is a practical action to achieve a specific purpose.
You are not crazy for never thinking land acknowledgements had anything to do with giving land back.
Ah, the myth of the noble savage rears its head again. I’m not Native American, so I don’t know what they think of all this, but I can say that if a bunch of savior-y people started “honoring” me in this way, I’d be pretty offended.
What on earth makes you think that these, quote, indigenous people "valued the ecosystem that they managed for millennia?" They didn't know what an ecosystem was. The (very) different nations of the continent moved around a lot and killed off other nations, and were killed off themselves, and the survivors reconstituted themselves regularly, so "they" (whatever that means) could not have managed anything for millennia even if they had the power to do so. They couldn't damage nature much because there were very few of them and they didn't have the technology to do it.
Anyone has the right to make up anything that has symbolic meaning to them, and your ceremony sounds very poetic and lovely. But let's not confuse it for science or history, and certainly not impose it on others as a test of virtue.
They are asking us to do these things.
I believe the indigenous people valued the ecosystem because I've done basic research about what we know of their civilizations. Try it.
It is certainly a popular idea and I’m sure there are many books. Can you give a couple of examples of when Native Americans were observed doing this?
Thanks for this. He spent far too long in this piece knocking down a straw man.
Noah is reacting to SF, where these ideas originated. And he is correct.
No, they started in New Zealand and Canada: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23200329/land-acknowledgments-indigenous-landback
It did occur to me that land acknowledgements would seem much sillier in California than in the Midwest, which I think Noah's take was too Twitter-informed. The destruction of the tall grass prairie -- a biome we've destroyed down to a fraction of a percent of its original size -- is akin to the destruction of the entire rain forest, and when your house is built on that land, the tragedy of our arrival is felt more intimately. At least in my experience, having moved from Phoenix to Michigan several years ago.
Did your neighbors feel the “tragedy of your arrival” when you got to Michigan?
Get over yourself. Feeling shame for what happened centuries ago does not make you a better person.
Focus on doing good deeds that result in betterment for your community. These land acknowledgments are just an excuse for doing nothing and feeling self-righteous about it.
They are a convenient excuse for inaction.
I took action! Prairie restoration is a community-driven movement here in the Midwest that often allies with Native American communities. I am an eager participant. I promise it's not just for guilt and shame.
Well, at least you are doing something. I give you credit for that.
I was thinking more about action that materially benefit human beings, but what you are doing is better than most people.
The fundamental driver of ecological restoration is the genuinely held belief by its participants that this is a very direct human benefit. If insect life declines too severely, we may very well go with them. The nutrient cycle depends heavily on nature keeping its wheels turning.
Israel is a country that is mostly populated by waves of refugees fleeing persecution and violence, as well as their descendants.
We tend to hear about the early Zionists and their explicitly colonial project. That’s real. The critical mass of population that has made Israel’s continued survival actually possible though, was refugees. First from Europe. Then from the Middle East. Then, finally, from the Soviet Union. Quite extreme anti-semitism drove all those people to Israel, rather than any sort of Zionistic colonial quest.
I’m also not a fan of ethnocentrism in general, but it’s not hard to see where Israelis are coming from. I’m also not a fan of war, but I won’t be in favor of America laying down our arms until everyone else does.
Certainly agree very strongly with the last sentence. But Israel's land grabs in the West Bank are absolutely an ongoing colonial project of territorial conquest.
Without a doubt. It also was a failure of vision.
The seizure of the West Bank was intended to create a buffer zone between Israel and a hostile neighboring country against which it had fought two wars. The land could then be traded for peace at some future date.
But the aging leaders of Israel’s then dominant center-left Labor Party government failed to take full measure of a growing, religious-nationalist movement within the country who saw the conquest as an affirmation of their own messianic ideology and themselves as a second generation of Zionist “Pioneers”.
These “settlers” slowly began to build Jewish homesteads on the occupied land. Little was done by the government to dissuade them. When the center-right Revisionist Zionist Likud Party finally toppled the Labor coalition in the late 1970’s, the new government threw its full weight behind settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza. What had been a small but steady trickle of settlers into the occupied territories in the previous decade became a proverbial raging river.
It wasn't just the rise of the Religious Zionist settlement movement, although perhaps such a movement could have been predicted given that the West Bank was "Judea and Samaria", ie the very core of the Jewish states of antiquity. This reminds me a bit of Kosovo/a, whose importance was exaggerated by late 20th century Serbs largely because medieval Serbia had a more southerly center of gravity than modern Serbia.
It was also the fact that the neighboring country ended up being betrayed (in the "Black September" conflict) by the very people who inhabited the captured territory, and thus ended up washing its hands of them.
I agree. The PLO didn’t make things easier for the Palestinians when they attempted a coup against King Hussein that resulted in their expulsion from Jordan by force (“Black September”).
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that the Israeli settlements should never have been permitted. From 1967 onwards, Israel lost much of the international goodwill that had existed since its founding
Then why should Arab settlements be permitted in Israel?
What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable. Shocking Israel doesn’t just play along with that.
I am critical of Israeli WB policy, but let’s not act like “international goodwill” has ever been fair to Israel.
I agree with you.
Still though. I think you oversimplify with “colonial project of territorial conquest”.
When you add in e.g. that it had been Jordan, why Jordan doesn’t want it now, WB Palestinians rejecting peace etc., I just don’t think it’s that simple.
I am critical of Israeli settlement policy in WB but let’s drop the indigenous/colonizer nonsense. Jews have always lived in the WB. There are Arab settlements in Israel there can be Jewish settlements in Palestine. Again, I oppose Israeli govt policy there, but I won’t oversimplify.
Land can be given back, if peace is made. Can't say that about human lives.
Israel has never annexed a single inch of land on the West Bank. Not one.
East Jerusalem?
So ethnocentrism is bad except in the specific case of Isreal? That is a peculiar stance to take. I support a one state solution, where the inhabitants all have equal rights. In fact, it is the only reasonable and just solution left to the conflict, absent ethnic cleansing by one side or another.
I theoretically agree. But in practice if the inhabitants of the single polity would just immediately decide into civil war or ethnic cleansing of the minority then a single state (in the short term) doesn’t work either. Unfortunately this is a tragic situation without a clean solution. The most recent solution that might have worked would be annexation of Gaza by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan and integration of the those peoples into the relevant states. This was somewhat attempted but rejected by the Palestinians of the loss of their objective for a state (which it was).
The Jordanians did give citizenship to West Bank Palestinians pre-1967, but Gazans have been stateless since 1948: perhaps this difference was because Jordanians (like Palestinians) are Levantine Arabs and are thus similar linguistically and culturally, while Egyptians have a different culture shaped by the Nile, along with their own quite different dialect of Arabic?
This is potentially a good solution but would require displacing 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. This doesn't seem likely, barring some kind of Palestinian military victory, and would perhaps qualify as ethnic cleansing in any case. I don't think Americans realize how there is no contiguous state left for either Palestinian nationhood or even Jordanian annexation. Please tell me more about this effort to return the West Bank to Jordan. I am unaware of it.
America is also not contiguous, so what?
Long Island! The injustice!
A one-state solution, with equal democratic rights, exists in Palestine at this very moment. It's called Israel.
What country and citizenship do Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza have?
With annexation, they could potentially become Israeli citizens. Any "Palestinians" who don't like that solution can leave. Same goes for bigots (among the Jews) who refuse to integrate. That's what it will take for Israel to become a full-fledged (multi-ethnic) liberal democracy. And that's a lesson in statecraft that we Jews must learn, and in which we can (and must) lead the world.
Note that I said "Israel," not "Palestine." There is no plausible Palestinian counterpart to Israel, and neither population truly wants to be partitioned -- while Palestinian nationalism is predicated on refusal to welcome the presence of significant numbers of Jews.
Israel is already a full-fledged, multi-ethnic democracy, which was built by Zionists. They have no intention of importing any Palestinians who are sworn to destroy that. Peace must come *before* any of these bright ideas can be put on the table. And that's in the hands of the Palestinians.
In a full-fledged liberal democracy, "self-determination" is a right that belongs to every INDIVIDUAL -- regardless of ethnicity. I believe in the narrative of Exile and Return, but not in "Jewish nationalism," i.e., ethnocracy, the notion of a "Jewish state."
As per my second paragraph, I don't support Palestinian nationalism, either -- but not all Palestinians are sworn to destroy Jews, and -- given a chance to become full-fledged citizens, not all Palestinians would harbor antipathy toward Israel.
Meanwhile, continued segregation (with its gerrymandered, "side-by-side" ethno-states) can only serve to prolong that antipathy.
I believe that Israel must be a refuge that's safe for Jews, but that needn't require a "Jewish state," any more than the US needs to be a "Christian Republic" in order to be safe for Evangelicals (or a "white people's" state to be safe for Anglo whites).
What we've been witnessing has been a civil war in Eretz Yisrael -- from the river to the sea -- and Israel needs a Lincoln.
PS: Please see my reply to Matthew elsewhere in this discussion (beginning "If Palestinians (Israeli Arabs) are allowed to have permanent homes in Israel, why shouldn't Jews be welcome to have permanent homes in 'Palestine'?" -- and my remarks there about Judah Magnes, which should further clarify my position and my full aspiration for Israel and for my fellow Jews.
Both sides have to want peace and elements of both sides are not interested. The settlers have at least as much to do with the inability of compromise as any other elements. Far more have civilians have been killed in the West Bank by Israelis (mostly settlers or in conflicts instigated by settlers) than visa versa. Israel is fundamentally uninterested in pursuing peace with Palestine and this has been the situation ever since Netanyahu took power.
Just be honest and say you want a Jewish ethnostate. Even if the Palestinians of the West Bank were willing to peacefully integrate into Israel, you would probably refuse on the grounds that it would dilute the Jewish ethnostate.
As you and I have discussed before (in fact it was that discussion that clarified my thinking), yes. History demonstrates that the Jews are *uniquely* vulnerable, and cannot rely on the safeguarding of minority rights offered by multiethnic liberal states. I honestly don't know why that is, but it has been demonstrated to my satisfaction.
(and what evidence would convince you that a one state solution would not work, if Hamas has not been able to?)
70% of non-Orthodox Jews in the US now intermarry with non-Jews. US is quite safe for Jews overall. Just be honest and say you want a Jewish ethnostate to protect the Jewish ethnicity from assimilation.
Do you even live in the US. Have you seen the masked street mobs? The murderous verbal and physical threats? The marking of Jewish spaces? The indifference of the police and other authorities? You’ve got everything but the flames and broken glass going on here.
It is a disgrace on our country that this happens. The only thing to say is that it’s still safer than France or England. Not a high bar to cross.
I myself am a Canadian atheist, but I grant your point.
Yes, that was a good discussion, thank you. All we know about the future is that it won't be like the past. What do you think Israel will look like 100 years from now? I don't believe the current fiction of "occupied territories" is tenable in the long run, though it could last as long as American hegemony.
100 years is a long time, so tough to say. Their immediate future seems assured.
Absolutely not my take.
I said understandable, and didn’t limit that to Israel.
Mostly? I read that 60% of Jewish people in Israel are Mizrahi Jews who are indigenous to the region. Let’s also not forget about the many Israeli Arabs.
Mostly refugees and mostly from the region too. Yes. There are a lot of mixed Mizrahi / Ashkenazi at this point so I think the higher end figures (e.g. 60% you cite) may include mixed. I’m a little hazy on that. At the end of the day though, I’m very much with Noah and the article here- indigenous land claims are problematic on their face.
It’s kind of ironic that for 1000 years the New Years toast was “next year in Jerusalem” for Jewish people. And amazingly enough, they pulled it off! But now the claim is that indigenous claims are problematic.
The largest group of Mizrahi Jews are North African Jews, who derive much of their ancestry from Sephardic Jews of Spain, who in turn derive most of their ancestry from Roman Italy
One of the goals of the Zionist project, back in the day, was to benefit the local Arabs through their development projects. But the nationalists and the fascists got to the Arabs first.
Palestinians can prove they have surrendered when they can demonstrate they can have responsible leadership that is both willing and able to extirpate the terrorists in their midst. No more payoffs to the families of dead terrorists, no more murderous rhetoric, no more double-talk in Arabic and English, no more maneuvering at the UN to defame and threaten Jews on the world stage. This is table stakes.
The identity obsessed Left and Trump’s right-wing populist movement share three contemptible qualities:
1. They are nihilists who despise America’s liberal traditions & institutions.
2. Both harbor a deep contempt for this country and the mass of its people.
3. They are deeply, almost proudly ignorant of American civics and history, save for cherry-picked “facts” they regurgitate without any consideration of context.
100% agreed. I'm at the point where I just consider blind populism a cancer and instead of leaders leading people these movements just promise everything to everyone. At some point you are doing way more harm than good to your electorate. There is a venn diagram where people on the right and left are overlapping here.