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.
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.
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
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.
Our politics is firmly postliberal now. Deneen has got his wish. Locke's value-neutral state has been tossed into the dustbin of history. Fukuyama's "end of history" was wrong; Huntington's "class of civilizations" was right. It remains to be seen whether Western civilization still believes in itself enough to survive.
There will be some liberals like Noah and Bari Weiss and David Brooks and David Brooks playing Weekend at Bernies for a while, but Enlightenment liberalism is dead.
I’m not sure the infinite regress argument persuades me when it comes to absolving the need to settle land claims in a just manner. One key limit on the regress is if the relevant parties still exist, what the nature of the agreements struck with them were and how they were obtained (basically were agreements struck in good faith or effectively under duress).
I don’t know the history of jurisprudence on these questions in the US but Canada and its First Nations have a long, blemished history of agreements signed, broken and in some cases reaffirmed.
Noah addresses the need to uphold tribal rights and live up to obligations so this isn’t really a disagreement so much as a change in emphasis. I’m not a big fan of empty land acknowledgements or the idea that all of North America is stolen land but many First Nation/tribal land claims are valid and can and should be upheld. The longer that outstanding claims are left unresolved the greater the injustice.
The "infinite regress" argument (actually finite regress, as I note) is about explaining why the morality of irredentist ethnonationalism is dubious. It's not about abrogating treaty obligations.
"many First Nation/tribal land claims are valid and can and should be upheld" <-- Agree!!
Yeah I'm not sure if Noah picking out some of the loudest voices that are idiots online to support the view helped.
Even in one of the more recent Supreme Court rulings "McGirt v. Oklahoma". The court decided that 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.
Even Gorsuch wrote in his opinion that the US Congress made many promises to the Native Americans in turning over reservations have gone unfulfilled, and rejected the argument presented by the state and federal government that he summarized as: "Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye.
I wonder how Noah feels about what is happening in New Zealand right now and how some lawmakers broke into a Haka—a traditional Maori dance to protest the proposed treaty acknowledgement changes.
There is a balance between acknowledging our past, owning it and bringing us all up together. It doesn't mean we have to listen to the far left or consider them serious when it comes to just giving land back. That'll never happen. Finally the argument of conquest hundreds of years ago falls flat, when there is literal conquest still happening today that most of us are against.
We should probably just acknowledge the Right of Conquest as real, if unjust. Rather than considering some kind of aberration. It just exists in a balance of other factors such as self-determination. One of the reasons stronger action wasn’t taken with the annexation of Crimea was that the population was generally in favor. The crime was the violation of international norms, no subjugation. Yet for the rest of the country they clearly don’t want to submit. Multiple factors have weight.
Neil gorsuch, in the decision you laud in this piece, was only able to rule based on the plain letter law because it was the 21st century.
What changed between 1905 and now?
The fact that Americans as a group do accept and acknowledge that land was taken from Native Americans through both plain old violence and extra legal means.
Similarly, the Vancouver development only came about because the Squamish nation was able to prevail in Canadian courts. For most of Canadian history, they would never have been able to bring that case.
Are land acknowledgements the best way to build that awareness? I don't know. Does that awareness need to be built and does it help
people in the here and now? It does.
There is also a problem of not addressing actual current Israeli plans by sitting Israeli officials to violently conquer Gaza. It seems to be taking the implicit attitude that A) because Hamas is bad, B) violent conquest is common throughout history, that Israel's official policy of removing the local population in Gaza and slowly settling and taking control of the West Bank aren't worth mentioning.
Again, what are we objecting to in Ukraine if all you need to do to settle land outside of your institutionally recognized boundaries is a lethal army and a tragedy 80 years ago?
There is a norm NOW that violent territorial conquest is a bad thing. How do we maintain that norm if we adopt an attitude that says, "Lol, violent conquest before 1912 was fine." Do we teach history that says, "Well, in 1829, the US Congress agreed to sell off Cherokee land and evict them, (in contravention of existing treaties and objected to by the supreme court at the time) but it happened and was legal. So no wrong was done."
Hmm. This is a dialectical argument. It's kind of equivalent to arguing that communism is good because it forced democracies to take working-class issues and inequality more seriously. Communism probably DID do that. But that isn't enough to make communism good, as a system of government. I am not very friendly to the idea that extremes are necessary to balance out other extremes, even though in practice this often does happen.
This piece doesn't do the work of saying how narrow institutions become open and inclusive, though the Native Renaissance in the piece depends on that having happened.
Part of it was a concerted campaign to change the culture from 1950's "white people can kill injuns because they are just antagonists to the good cowboys" to "Maybe Native Americans were systematically disenfranchised and robbed and the US government and its modern people should keep that in mind".
This piece just takes it for granted that this change happens. I think Occupying Alcatraz in 1969 was a better method than land acknowledgement, but it comes from the same impulse. Get wider American society and institutions to acknowledge the injustice.
I don’t think we have to think that earlier land grabs were “fine” any more than we think slavery or any previous ideas were “fine.” We should acknowledge the cruelty without blaming current inhabitants.
It’s always interesting to me that lots of academics and youth start the clock around 1400…and seem to forget that there was a considerable amount of history before that in which Europeans were NOT the dominant force.
Totally agree. The African slave trade existed for essentially 1000 years before Europeans came onto the scene. China was building a massive empire while Europeans were still trying and failing to re-discover indoor plumbing. Etc. etc.
My understanding is that the Arabs were pretty industrial about the African slave trade; trading the most in absolute numbers.
Europeans brought transatlantic trade to the thing, spreading founding populations of Africans to N and S America, which is probably the largest lasting effect of the slave trade.
There's a lot of daylight between "Land acknowledgments are counter-productive" and "Lol, violent conquest before 1912 was fine." People can agree that violent conquests in the past were wrong and reasonably disagree about the right way to ameliorate the effects of that.
Well violent conquests in the past largely WERENT wrong because they weren’t considered as such. Morality is a constantly moving target. Slavery is the normal way of the world until it isn’t. Taking the other tribe’s territory and resources is fine until it isn’t.
The only way you can judge people of the past is against the morality of their times, or with a presentist caveat of “we now find this to be wrong.”
Everyone knows the US and the Old World in general has directly and indirectly led to the death of hundreds of millions of indigenous since the Columbian exchange. We all know that! Everyone was taught that in school! It's the history not only of our country but of many large civilizations the world over.
The lesson we all learn about this story is actually simple stuff. It's this: as a society, we should reasonably do what we can to enable and support the people that remain, and treat them with dignity and respect.
If you want to "raise awareness" about specific active disputes where people are being taken advantage of in the present day, great.
But land acknowledgements are not raising awareness of anything. At best, it's harmless virtue signaling. At worst, it's a way to manipulate the emotions of people to get them to support absurd ideologies that have no bearing in reality, like decolonization.
So it is the government of Mexico somehow killing 45,000 Americans.
Would the American government then be justified in killing 1,280,000 Mexicans (1% of the Mexican population i.e. The death toll in Gaza) in order to destroy the Mexican government and would America be further justified in
formally annexing a chunk of Mexico?
How much violence justifies a retributory annexation? What's the threshold? What's the principle?
To keep it accurate you’d have to also have a scenario in which Mexico wishes to not merely overturn the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo but also claim all of the US, and Mexico repeatedly turned down offers that would establish their current territory as legitimate, and Mexico kept shooting rockets into Texas.
In that case, perhaps an annexation would be justified?
For the record, I don’t actually want Israel to annex Gaza — i don’t think that’s the best outcome for anyone. But I don’t really know what Israel is supposed to do. When Palestine turned down the Clinton-brokered deal which was the best offer they possibly could have expected, when 10/7 occurs simply because Hamas worries they’re being forgotten as a world issue and peace is coming to the region…what logical course of action is Israel supposed to take?
What would be the proportional amount of Americans kidnapped by Mexico in this hypothetical? Hamas does not stop with brutal murders and rapes, etc. They like to hold hostages. They are still holding hostages, unless those remaining hostages are all dead.
Easy answer. Yes. The big differentiator here is the western allies didn't annex Axis territory or seek to obliterate the Japanese or the Germans as a people. (The Soviet mass expulsion of Germans to move Poland's borders west while annexing the eastern part via violent conquest was wrong though.)
The movie Swordfish: "They bomb a church, we bomb ten. They hijack a plane, we take out an airport. They execute American tourists, we nuke an entire city. We make terrorism so horrific that attacking Americans is unthinkable.”
Travolta's character in the movie is an amoral, Nietzschean, asshole. But he's also got a point. International relations has always been governed by jungle law. Is it right? Not sure. Is it reality? Yes. And pretending its not gets you killed.
Why are we dragging right and wrong into the teaching of history anyway? The people we are talking about lived centuries ago and had radically different mores and sense of justice from ours. Your (or my) modern opinion about the justice and morality of what happened to these long-dead people is literally worthless, and also stunningly boring. Much better to spend our time deepening our understanding.
I live in Berkeley and you see this sort of thing all over. There’s even a public school with a huge “Rematriate the Land” mural. I’ve always wondered what specifically this is advocating because as you say it can lead to some dark things.
I live in the Bay Area, and know the mentality here - if Berkeley were actually repatriated to the Ohlone, and the Ohlone did as the Squamish did and decided that some giant high-rises would be just the ticket to ease the housing crunch - the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth would be heard in Australia.
Let’s just say “next county over” so howdy, neighbor. The Native people who once lived here were, technically, Bay Miwok, not Ohlone, but they are now all subsumed under the Mukwekma Ohlone tribe. And if they want to buy and build they can be my guest. The caterwauling from the NIMBYs will be as music to my ears.
I can’t help but feel that decolonization slop is downstream of a basic erosion of what it means to exhibit virtue.
I felt the same after reading Yglesias’s recent post about blue city governance failures. Matt, as usual, criticized democrats. At the same time, he praised their generally “more humane” instincts. I rolled my eyes pretty hard.
Self righteous grandstanding is not virtue. You want to help people? Write a check. Demanding someone else give their money to a third party? Get a life.
We are literally at the point where someone making 400k per year votes for a lady promising that America is a deeply unfair place that must be rehabilitated. She also promises, no, you 400k earner shouldn’t be asked to contribute an additional dime. No, the people already paying much more need to pay even more still. And this voter actually thinks they are morally superior to others for casting that vote.
News flash. Virtue requires sacrifice.
Those evil Republicans. They give more charity. They serve in the military at higher rates. Evil.
The good people, we’re told, are always “fighting” for whatever cause. Fighting. Never sacrificing.
I’ve never voted for a Republican but nothing makes me angrier than self righteous lefties.
If only Stalin were still around to give them all their just deserts.
I'm a bit tired of hearing the Republicans give more to charity line as if that's not a virtue signals in itself and the details aren't more nuanced... I assume you are talking about this study? ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21000752). We are talking about a few hundred dollars difference annually in the study from a few years ago. And it counts giving to your church as charitable giving. One of the key points of that study is:
> Since conventional wisdom argues that political conservatives are more charitable than political liberals due to their religiosity (Brooks, 2007; Vaidyanathan et al., 2011), it is reasonable to hypothesize that the effect size of political ideology and charitable giving will decrease when religiosity is controlled for. Our meta-regression results endorsed this hypothesis. When religiosity was controlled for in original studies, the effects were significantly smaller than those in which religiosity was not controlled for.
So basically, when you take religion out of it and just account for income it's basically all the same, the main difference it seems to be seems to be among the church going folks who donate a little more vs not, however left leaning people seem to support greater taxation and the government to solve problems.
I also find it rich that that you mention the "good people" always fighting since the right wing in this country call everything a war. A war on traditional families, a war on Christmas, a war on woke. We can definitely agree that a lot of leftists are self righteous and love to virtue signals without solving problems but there is no monopoly on one group or the other thinking they are better than the other. People thinking that because they are performative in their support for veterans but not supporting more VA aid doesn't make them better, or helping the poor except for those on Medicaid doesn't make them better. Same thing with people on the left, not policing, allowing rampant drug use, not building homes because of NIMBYism or not wanting to acknowledge that foreign policy is complicated and just pointing out societies ills while just posting things online doesn't make them good people either.
I agree with everything you’ve written here. I didn’t mean to imply Republicans are better. Tribe tells you almost nothing about whether someone is a good person. We seem to be quite aligned, really.
100% agreed mate. We are aligned, I didn't mean to come off with a bad tone, my apologies for that. I was agreeing with what you said too. Didn't mean to sound so nitpicky.
I like Yglesias’ work, but his criticism of “blue” city governance fell flat. It’s an oversimplification of the many complex aspects of urban life in America.
He was too soft on dem cities. A lot about cigarettes on the NYC subway platform, while in Seattle the police refuse to stop people from literally smoking fentanyl and meth inside of public buses.
The defund the police movement was so stupid. That is where a lot of people with critical thinking skills dropped the BLM movement, also when it came out that the main leaders were basically fraudulently enriching themselves and genuinely believed that we didn't need police smh. We pay police in cities well, let them do their jobs, and just hold them accountable when they do bad things. Hire more people to support them and have specialized groups for responding to certain issues as well, but defund was not a good moment imo.
Yes. A lot of people in the BLM/Defund movement, particularly young white “allies”, failed to account for the *experience of violent crime* within black communities themselves. As usual, these righteous, callow activists overshot the moment. They lost the script when would not brook any nuanced objections to their ideological positions. The November 2021 municipal elections in Minneapolis are instructive.
Voters in the city where George Floyd was murdered by Officer Derek Chauvin had the opportunity to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department through a ballot initiative, presumably to replace it with another law enforcement agency. Not surprisingly, the measure failed. But the devil was in the details.
The data revealed that voters in black majority wards in Minneapolis—a very segregated city—had opposed the ballot initiative by an even greater margin than voters in white majority precincts.
In other words, BLM activists had completely misread and/or disregarded the opinions of most urban blacks. Urban blacks, who are far more likely than whites to be victims of violent crime, didn’t want the police to leave. Quite the contrary: they wanted a greater police presence in their communities. Moreover, they wanted the police to treat them *like everybody else*.
Is it reasonable to say that black Americans are under-policed within the communities which they dominate demographically, but over-policed whenever they venture outside said communities?
The problem isn't that they're criminals themselves; it's that they're running a protection racket on their purported "communities" - in a symbiotic relationship with the dirty cops that they use as a foil.
Was "defund the police" also an especially stupid plan given that one of the causes of the 2014 Ferguson riots was that the underfunded Ferguson police had taken to using the black population as traffic-ticket cash cows?
Another simple thing we can do more of that would be of potential benefit to Native Americans (at least those of them who deeply care about their cultural heritage) is creating opportunities for more cultural influence and appreciation. Not the type where we do these sad and useless land acknowledgements, but the type where people in various parts of the U.S. learn more about the indigenous cultures of their respective regions and learn to appreciate aspects of those cultures that are still alive today. This could potentially create a larger market for various indigenous cultural performances, concerts, artwork, etc. A good example of this approach is Hawaii, where the indigenous Hawaiian culture is more broadly known, and has had a greater influence on the overall culture of the state, than is the case with the various Native American cultures of the U.S. mainland, and there are various ways in which Native Hawaiians can benefit financially from others' interest in their culture and way of life. I guess a major reason is that in Hawaii, Native Hawaiians make up around 10-20% of the population, which is a number big enough for this kind of cultural influence to be felt, whereas percentages of Native Americans in the U.S. mainland are extremely small. But I believe there is a way to replicate at least some aspects of what works in Hawaii elsewhere.
I grew up in Arkansas, and in grade school, we visited museums focused on Native Americans. I don't remember learning much, but they tried. I took classes in college that were better at driving interest. It wasn't much but I am glad there was something.
We might be different ages - I grew up in Texas - Native Americans were generally described in Texas history books as primitive savages that "good Texans" fought against and tamed. Museums about Native Americans would have been laughed at.
Aren't Native American peoples especially possessive of their own cultures in a way that other peoples (especially ones which aren't survivors of settler-colonial genocides) are not, to the point that they likely had a significant role in fomenting US progressive paranoia about "cultural appropriation" in the first place?
I was specifically thinking of Hawaii as I read this piece and the enriching personal experiences I have had getting to know Native Hawaiians, witnessing their rituals, and learning about their philosophy towards nature. I have similar positive memories learning about native peoples growing up in the Pacific Northwest. There is value in ways of living that our culture and markets do not in fact value very much, and that is our loss.
It’s truly one of the dumbest, most obviously flawed things that people believe. To say that this land belongs to the X people requires that you arbitrarily pick a year (typically in the 16th to 19th century) and claim that whoever owned the land in that year is the true rightful owner. It’s one of those things I can’t understand how any reasonably intelligent person can do
This is a strange piece. It’s anti ethnic nationalism but pro colonisation, ignoring that fact that there was an ethnic and racial reasons, said and unsaid, for America’s colonisation of the west of North America. This wasn’t in dispute in the 19C.
Has ethnic nationalism lost favour in the post war period? The right to self-determination is an internationally recognized principle enshrined in documents like the United Nations Charter and various human rights treaties. And the self determined people are mostly ethnic groups. Besides this everybody has some nationalist view on most conflicts - like Israel Palestine. Or freeing Tibet which has been off and on part of China for centuries, or keeping the independence of Taiwan where the country itself sees it self as not just Chinese but China. In these cases the larger entity decries the nationalism of the lessor.
Or take Ukraine where it’s Putin who denies the self determination of the Ukrainians by denying they exist in the first place, he puts Ukrainian nationalism as a 19C construct.
Also I’m not sure that most of the world is anti ethno nationalism - it’s more a western ideology driven rather by the needs of commerce than any problems we had with Norway being Norway post war.
Taiwan doesn't see itself as any form of China... But China has said they will invade if the island tries to change the name or the claims to the mainland.
And I am saying that is like when an abused spouse leaves a marriage, but the ex husband says "If you ever get rid of my last name, I will murder you."
You wouldn't look at that person twenty years later and say, "Awww, she still has his last name, she must still love him a little bit."
Taiwan is open about being ethnically Chinese, but they see that as having no bearing on the political issue.
Too often people look at the ROC name and assume it represents current feeling rather than historic pathway dependence and a current threat of violence.
This is changing as the older Chinese identifying population dying off. More and more younger folks (and the current ruling party identify themselves Taiwanese)
The island of Taiwan ( aka Taipei or Formosa ) which had a small native population was first occupied and partially colonized by the Dutch, then the Spanish, then Koxinga of the Ming dynasty, then by the Qing dynasty, then the Japanese empire, and finally by the KuoMinTang who founded the Republic of China. So which Taiwan doesn’t see itself as any form of China, all of them?
In a liberal democracy, self-determination (regardless of ethnicity) is an individual right. Individuals are free to associate and to maintain their customs within that context.
This is interesting and seems broadly true! I appreciate some rebuttals of some of the weaker parts of progressive orthodoxy, and while land acknowledgements are a small thing it's worth pointing out the problems with them.
Your thoughts lately seem to suggest that the road ahead will have a lot of similar battles for the progressive movement. I'd be curious about your thoughts on why the path forward for progressives is about hippie-punching, while conservatives don't seem to be obligated to do an equivalent amount of nazi-punching. It does seem worth poking holes in far-left ideas, but it's notable that the right doesn't seem to pay much political price for tacitly endorsing far-right ideas like The Great Replacement. Is this assymetry true? Is it technological, social, specific to our moment? While I think it's worth doing things like this, it's hard to see a future for the left that relies too much on fighting its own left flank instead of the actual dictators and genuine racist bad guys.
Wokesters (with all their granular rules) aren't hippies!
You'll find more longhaired dudes at a country music concert than in Berkeley. Trust me, I'm gay; I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I'm attracted to hippie types -- not to any so-called "boy" with a vagina.
I get my perspective from the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, & Kafka. So much for any would-be administrative caste policing people's behavior (and language) with a checklist on a clipboard.
As I lament to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore!"
To steelman land acknowledgments, I think the idea behind them (for most people, there are obviously crazies out there as demonstrated by the group the post links to) isn't an expectation that the land will actually ever be returned to the tribes they list in the form of an ethnostate for those tribes; it's more like a generalized, collective apology for the injustices of the past. In my experience, indigenous people who like land acknowledgments like the idea that their continued existence is being acknowledged, but don't expect current occupants to vacate the land for them.
My problem with them is that they tend to be awkwardly shoehorned into contexts where they don't accomplish anything and bring more weird attention to the person making them - like the dance recital mentioned in this post. They actually feel self-important, like someone's random improv show is a big enough occasion to be tied to historical injustice. I think this is why they rub people the wrong way and are called "performative". Moreover, unless you actually intend to vacate the land where you're living or working and give it to indigenous people (which no one does), you're basically saying "this land I live on belongs to this tribe, but I'm not going anywhere, so I guess we're stuck with that". I'm not sure that leads anywhere useful.
I can see there being good contexts for them. For example, a lecture on local history should acknowledge the indigenous history of the area. But I generally see them as a social justice dead-end, and one of those ideas that Democrats should probably distance themselves from in order to regain power.
Every spot of ground on Earth has been occupied by a different group of people than those on it now. The losers were conquered. People have accepted this reality for millennia. Only the modern, Western liberal feels the need to pretend to care about those their ancestors defeated.
I view these land acknowledgments as the replacement for the "Pledge of Allegiance". If you are old enough, you will recall that the pledge was routinely performed (and was just as performative) before pretty all meetings or group events. City council meeting in 1974: "Pledge of Allegiance". City council meeting in 2024: "Stolen Land Acknowledgement". Wonder what it will be in 2074 (assuming there are still city council meetings)
The way forward is to trade land acknowledgments for just resolutions of broken treaties and stalled land claims. As a Canadian I am proud that we have come to a number of multi-billion dollar settlements for outstanding cases.
I'm pretty sure I've heard criticism of land acknowledgements somewhere before. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear the criticism well because of all the liberals in the room trying to silence the speaker and declaring that they felt "unsafe" with him on campus. Careful Noah; you're treading near a liberal red-line: "though shalt always side with the intersectionally oppressed."
More seriously, I had never seen land acknowledgements as a form of ethnonationalism, but they are. It's obvious, but genius lies in finding the obvious things that others don't notice. Thanks for that.
Also, in my experience, most people who take their tribal descent seriously actually prefer the term American Indian. I think Native American is kind of like Latinx in that way.
The clearest explanation of why ethnostates such as Israel (or a Palestinian state) are wrong is "This Land Is Mine" by Nina Paley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pKMV6e5kEo
Whenever you hear an "economic" explanation about why something is inefficient, you should remember the ideas of second best economics. Very often, it is propaganda from those who want to streamline the route to monopoly, which could be even more inefficient. Auto dealership requirements, for example, were in part established to remove some of the monopoly power of manufacturers who could otherwise raise prices AND squeeze the dealerships to maximize their profits. Is there a ever clear answer in second best economics? No. But when the alternative is enlarging a monopoly, countervailing forces that distribute the income more widely seem like a good idea to help keep monopolies in check.
Using tribal organizations as a fig leaf for evading zoning and other regulations is another example of second-best economics. The down side is that it can cause all sorts of externalities that would be protected by law. Which externalities would be worse, those with or those without that zoning evasion? That's not easy to discern. Not to mention the fact that tribal organizations are themselves obviously the ethnostates that Noah decries.
It's very hard for modern Westerners to accept "to the victor go the spoils", but their own society (and every other) exists because millennia of their ancestors had so such moral difficulties. European liberal democracy wouldn't exist without brutal military conflict, both historically and as recently as WWII.
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.
There's too much history being taught! It's making White people uncomforatble.
Yeah, I agree, they were a bit of a fad and it was probably too much.
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.
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.
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
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.
Our politics is firmly postliberal now. Deneen has got his wish. Locke's value-neutral state has been tossed into the dustbin of history. Fukuyama's "end of history" was wrong; Huntington's "class of civilizations" was right. It remains to be seen whether Western civilization still believes in itself enough to survive.
There will be some liberals like Noah and Bari Weiss and David Brooks and David Brooks playing Weekend at Bernies for a while, but Enlightenment liberalism is dead.
I’m not sure the infinite regress argument persuades me when it comes to absolving the need to settle land claims in a just manner. One key limit on the regress is if the relevant parties still exist, what the nature of the agreements struck with them were and how they were obtained (basically were agreements struck in good faith or effectively under duress).
I don’t know the history of jurisprudence on these questions in the US but Canada and its First Nations have a long, blemished history of agreements signed, broken and in some cases reaffirmed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_Treaties
Noah addresses the need to uphold tribal rights and live up to obligations so this isn’t really a disagreement so much as a change in emphasis. I’m not a big fan of empty land acknowledgements or the idea that all of North America is stolen land but many First Nation/tribal land claims are valid and can and should be upheld. The longer that outstanding claims are left unresolved the greater the injustice.
The "infinite regress" argument (actually finite regress, as I note) is about explaining why the morality of irredentist ethnonationalism is dubious. It's not about abrogating treaty obligations.
"many First Nation/tribal land claims are valid and can and should be upheld" <-- Agree!!
Yeah I'm not sure if Noah picking out some of the loudest voices that are idiots online to support the view helped.
Even in one of the more recent Supreme Court rulings "McGirt v. Oklahoma". The court decided that 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.
Even Gorsuch wrote in his opinion that the US Congress made many promises to the Native Americans in turning over reservations have gone unfulfilled, and rejected the argument presented by the state and federal government that he summarized as: "Yes, promises were made, but the price of keeping them has become too great, so now we should just cast a blind eye.
I wonder how Noah feels about what is happening in New Zealand right now and how some lawmakers broke into a Haka—a traditional Maori dance to protest the proposed treaty acknowledgement changes.
There is a balance between acknowledging our past, owning it and bringing us all up together. It doesn't mean we have to listen to the far left or consider them serious when it comes to just giving land back. That'll never happen. Finally the argument of conquest hundreds of years ago falls flat, when there is literal conquest still happening today that most of us are against.
Did you not see the part of my post where I linked to the very same court decision you just wrote about in this comment?
We should probably just acknowledge the Right of Conquest as real, if unjust. Rather than considering some kind of aberration. It just exists in a balance of other factors such as self-determination. One of the reasons stronger action wasn’t taken with the annexation of Crimea was that the population was generally in favor. The crime was the violation of international norms, no subjugation. Yet for the rest of the country they clearly don’t want to submit. Multiple factors have weight.
Good points.
This is poorly reasoned in a lot of ways.
Neil gorsuch, in the decision you laud in this piece, was only able to rule based on the plain letter law because it was the 21st century.
What changed between 1905 and now?
The fact that Americans as a group do accept and acknowledge that land was taken from Native Americans through both plain old violence and extra legal means.
Similarly, the Vancouver development only came about because the Squamish nation was able to prevail in Canadian courts. For most of Canadian history, they would never have been able to bring that case.
Are land acknowledgements the best way to build that awareness? I don't know. Does that awareness need to be built and does it help
people in the here and now? It does.
There is also a problem of not addressing actual current Israeli plans by sitting Israeli officials to violently conquer Gaza. It seems to be taking the implicit attitude that A) because Hamas is bad, B) violent conquest is common throughout history, that Israel's official policy of removing the local population in Gaza and slowly settling and taking control of the West Bank aren't worth mentioning.
Again, what are we objecting to in Ukraine if all you need to do to settle land outside of your institutionally recognized boundaries is a lethal army and a tragedy 80 years ago?
There is a norm NOW that violent territorial conquest is a bad thing. How do we maintain that norm if we adopt an attitude that says, "Lol, violent conquest before 1912 was fine." Do we teach history that says, "Well, in 1829, the US Congress agreed to sell off Cherokee land and evict them, (in contravention of existing treaties and objected to by the supreme court at the time) but it happened and was legal. So no wrong was done."
This seems like a bad idea.
Hmm. This is a dialectical argument. It's kind of equivalent to arguing that communism is good because it forced democracies to take working-class issues and inequality more seriously. Communism probably DID do that. But that isn't enough to make communism good, as a system of government. I am not very friendly to the idea that extremes are necessary to balance out other extremes, even though in practice this often does happen.
This piece doesn't do the work of saying how narrow institutions become open and inclusive, though the Native Renaissance in the piece depends on that having happened.
Part of it was a concerted campaign to change the culture from 1950's "white people can kill injuns because they are just antagonists to the good cowboys" to "Maybe Native Americans were systematically disenfranchised and robbed and the US government and its modern people should keep that in mind".
This piece just takes it for granted that this change happens. I think Occupying Alcatraz in 1969 was a better method than land acknowledgement, but it comes from the same impulse. Get wider American society and institutions to acknowledge the injustice.
I don’t think we have to think that earlier land grabs were “fine” any more than we think slavery or any previous ideas were “fine.” We should acknowledge the cruelty without blaming current inhabitants.
It’s always interesting to me that lots of academics and youth start the clock around 1400…and seem to forget that there was a considerable amount of history before that in which Europeans were NOT the dominant force.
Totally agree. The African slave trade existed for essentially 1000 years before Europeans came onto the scene. China was building a massive empire while Europeans were still trying and failing to re-discover indoor plumbing. Etc. etc.
The African slave trade was a boutique affair. It was the European innovations in capital and bureaucracy that really supercharged it.
It isn't that the Europeans were uniquely immoral, it was that the Europeans turned it into a "modern industry"
My understanding is that the Arabs were pretty industrial about the African slave trade; trading the most in absolute numbers.
Europeans brought transatlantic trade to the thing, spreading founding populations of Africans to N and S America, which is probably the largest lasting effect of the slave trade.
That's a fair assessment
There's a lot of daylight between "Land acknowledgments are counter-productive" and "Lol, violent conquest before 1912 was fine." People can agree that violent conquests in the past were wrong and reasonably disagree about the right way to ameliorate the effects of that.
Well violent conquests in the past largely WERENT wrong because they weren’t considered as such. Morality is a constantly moving target. Slavery is the normal way of the world until it isn’t. Taking the other tribe’s territory and resources is fine until it isn’t.
The only way you can judge people of the past is against the morality of their times, or with a presentist caveat of “we now find this to be wrong.”
What is the purpose of "raising awareness"?
Everyone knows the US and the Old World in general has directly and indirectly led to the death of hundreds of millions of indigenous since the Columbian exchange. We all know that! Everyone was taught that in school! It's the history not only of our country but of many large civilizations the world over.
The lesson we all learn about this story is actually simple stuff. It's this: as a society, we should reasonably do what we can to enable and support the people that remain, and treat them with dignity and respect.
If you want to "raise awareness" about specific active disputes where people are being taken advantage of in the present day, great.
But land acknowledgements are not raising awareness of anything. At best, it's harmless virtue signaling. At worst, it's a way to manipulate the emotions of people to get them to support absurd ideologies that have no bearing in reality, like decolonization.
"Dignity and respect" is a loaded phrase. Many (perhaps most) of the sorts of conflicts we're discussing are fights over its definition.
Ukraine parallel falls flat. Did Ukraine present an existential threat to Russian lives? Did they slaughter a thousand Russians in a terrorist attack?
No, but they were fighting an active war in the Donbass since 2014.
But let's say tomorrow, a Mexican drug cartel kidnaps and murders 50 Americans. Would the united states then be justified in annexing Sonora state?
50 lives is a silly parallel. If Mexico slaughtered 45,000, that would be a fair parallel to the 1000 Israel lost.
OK, let's scale it.
So it is the government of Mexico somehow killing 45,000 Americans.
Would the American government then be justified in killing 1,280,000 Mexicans (1% of the Mexican population i.e. The death toll in Gaza) in order to destroy the Mexican government and would America be further justified in
formally annexing a chunk of Mexico?
How much violence justifies a retributory annexation? What's the threshold? What's the principle?
To keep it accurate you’d have to also have a scenario in which Mexico wishes to not merely overturn the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo but also claim all of the US, and Mexico repeatedly turned down offers that would establish their current territory as legitimate, and Mexico kept shooting rockets into Texas.
In that case, perhaps an annexation would be justified?
For the record, I don’t actually want Israel to annex Gaza — i don’t think that’s the best outcome for anyone. But I don’t really know what Israel is supposed to do. When Palestine turned down the Clinton-brokered deal which was the best offer they possibly could have expected, when 10/7 occurs simply because Hamas worries they’re being forgotten as a world issue and peace is coming to the region…what logical course of action is Israel supposed to take?
What would be the proportional amount of Americans kidnapped by Mexico in this hypothetical? Hamas does not stop with brutal murders and rapes, etc. They like to hold hostages. They are still holding hostages, unless those remaining hostages are all dead.
Was the US justified in killing so many Japanese (or the Allies, in leveling Dresden) during WWII?
Easy answer. Yes. The big differentiator here is the western allies didn't annex Axis territory or seek to obliterate the Japanese or the Germans as a people. (The Soviet mass expulsion of Germans to move Poland's borders west while annexing the eastern part via violent conquest was wrong though.)
Yes
The movie Swordfish: "They bomb a church, we bomb ten. They hijack a plane, we take out an airport. They execute American tourists, we nuke an entire city. We make terrorism so horrific that attacking Americans is unthinkable.”
Travolta's character in the movie is an amoral, Nietzschean, asshole. But he's also got a point. International relations has always been governed by jungle law. Is it right? Not sure. Is it reality? Yes. And pretending its not gets you killed.
Why are we dragging right and wrong into the teaching of history anyway? The people we are talking about lived centuries ago and had radically different mores and sense of justice from ours. Your (or my) modern opinion about the justice and morality of what happened to these long-dead people is literally worthless, and also stunningly boring. Much better to spend our time deepening our understanding.
I live in Berkeley and you see this sort of thing all over. There’s even a public school with a huge “Rematriate the Land” mural. I’ve always wondered what specifically this is advocating because as you say it can lead to some dark things.
The purpose of land acknowledgments is to create a sense of Shame, that can then be manipulated towards other goals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvBaw393rNA
LOL
Yes, it would be much better for all of us if it were that simple!
Another alternative is for them to all wear "I am more moral than you are" T-Shirts...
I live in the Bay Area, and know the mentality here - if Berkeley were actually repatriated to the Ohlone, and the Ohlone did as the Squamish did and decided that some giant high-rises would be just the ticket to ease the housing crunch - the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth would be heard in Australia.
FWIW, is the résistance local (“not near me” in coalition with other “not near me”-ers?) or in principle and what principle?
Let’s just say “next county over” so howdy, neighbor. The Native people who once lived here were, technically, Bay Miwok, not Ohlone, but they are now all subsumed under the Mukwekma Ohlone tribe. And if they want to buy and build they can be my guest. The caterwauling from the NIMBYs will be as music to my ears.
It’s ironic that California had few Native American inhabitants, being that water was scarce there, before the Americans came.
I can’t help but feel that decolonization slop is downstream of a basic erosion of what it means to exhibit virtue.
I felt the same after reading Yglesias’s recent post about blue city governance failures. Matt, as usual, criticized democrats. At the same time, he praised their generally “more humane” instincts. I rolled my eyes pretty hard.
Self righteous grandstanding is not virtue. You want to help people? Write a check. Demanding someone else give their money to a third party? Get a life.
We are literally at the point where someone making 400k per year votes for a lady promising that America is a deeply unfair place that must be rehabilitated. She also promises, no, you 400k earner shouldn’t be asked to contribute an additional dime. No, the people already paying much more need to pay even more still. And this voter actually thinks they are morally superior to others for casting that vote.
News flash. Virtue requires sacrifice.
Those evil Republicans. They give more charity. They serve in the military at higher rates. Evil.
The good people, we’re told, are always “fighting” for whatever cause. Fighting. Never sacrificing.
I’ve never voted for a Republican but nothing makes me angrier than self righteous lefties.
If only Stalin were still around to give them all their just deserts.
I'm a bit tired of hearing the Republicans give more to charity line as if that's not a virtue signals in itself and the details aren't more nuanced... I assume you are talking about this study? ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21000752). We are talking about a few hundred dollars difference annually in the study from a few years ago. And it counts giving to your church as charitable giving. One of the key points of that study is:
> Since conventional wisdom argues that political conservatives are more charitable than political liberals due to their religiosity (Brooks, 2007; Vaidyanathan et al., 2011), it is reasonable to hypothesize that the effect size of political ideology and charitable giving will decrease when religiosity is controlled for. Our meta-regression results endorsed this hypothesis. When religiosity was controlled for in original studies, the effects were significantly smaller than those in which religiosity was not controlled for.
So basically, when you take religion out of it and just account for income it's basically all the same, the main difference it seems to be seems to be among the church going folks who donate a little more vs not, however left leaning people seem to support greater taxation and the government to solve problems.
I also find it rich that that you mention the "good people" always fighting since the right wing in this country call everything a war. A war on traditional families, a war on Christmas, a war on woke. We can definitely agree that a lot of leftists are self righteous and love to virtue signals without solving problems but there is no monopoly on one group or the other thinking they are better than the other. People thinking that because they are performative in their support for veterans but not supporting more VA aid doesn't make them better, or helping the poor except for those on Medicaid doesn't make them better. Same thing with people on the left, not policing, allowing rampant drug use, not building homes because of NIMBYism or not wanting to acknowledge that foreign policy is complicated and just pointing out societies ills while just posting things online doesn't make them good people either.
I agree with everything you’ve written here. I didn’t mean to imply Republicans are better. Tribe tells you almost nothing about whether someone is a good person. We seem to be quite aligned, really.
100% agreed mate. We are aligned, I didn't mean to come off with a bad tone, my apologies for that. I was agreeing with what you said too. Didn't mean to sound so nitpicky.
I like Yglesias’ work, but his criticism of “blue” city governance fell flat. It’s an oversimplification of the many complex aspects of urban life in America.
He was too soft on dem cities. A lot about cigarettes on the NYC subway platform, while in Seattle the police refuse to stop people from literally smoking fentanyl and meth inside of public buses.
The defund the police movement was so stupid. That is where a lot of people with critical thinking skills dropped the BLM movement, also when it came out that the main leaders were basically fraudulently enriching themselves and genuinely believed that we didn't need police smh. We pay police in cities well, let them do their jobs, and just hold them accountable when they do bad things. Hire more people to support them and have specialized groups for responding to certain issues as well, but defund was not a good moment imo.
Yes. A lot of people in the BLM/Defund movement, particularly young white “allies”, failed to account for the *experience of violent crime* within black communities themselves. As usual, these righteous, callow activists overshot the moment. They lost the script when would not brook any nuanced objections to their ideological positions. The November 2021 municipal elections in Minneapolis are instructive.
Voters in the city where George Floyd was murdered by Officer Derek Chauvin had the opportunity to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department through a ballot initiative, presumably to replace it with another law enforcement agency. Not surprisingly, the measure failed. But the devil was in the details.
The data revealed that voters in black majority wards in Minneapolis—a very segregated city—had opposed the ballot initiative by an even greater margin than voters in white majority precincts.
In other words, BLM activists had completely misread and/or disregarded the opinions of most urban blacks. Urban blacks, who are far more likely than whites to be victims of violent crime, didn’t want the police to leave. Quite the contrary: they wanted a greater police presence in their communities. Moreover, they wanted the police to treat them *like everybody else*.
Is it reasonable to say that black Americans are under-policed within the communities which they dominate demographically, but over-policed whenever they venture outside said communities?
I was wondering why the BLM movement ended up jumping the shark in this way, especially since black people are the biggest victims of crime in the US.
If some of the BLM leadership were criminals themselves then it could explain a lot!
The problem isn't that they're criminals themselves; it's that they're running a protection racket on their purported "communities" - in a symbiotic relationship with the dirty cops that they use as a foil.
Was "defund the police" also an especially stupid plan given that one of the causes of the 2014 Ferguson riots was that the underfunded Ferguson police had taken to using the black population as traffic-ticket cash cows?
"News flash. Virtue requires sacrifice."
I thought you just need a cheep plastic "in this house we wear 3 masks in the shower" yard signs and an NPR tote bag?
Don't worry, Stalin is on his way.
Another simple thing we can do more of that would be of potential benefit to Native Americans (at least those of them who deeply care about their cultural heritage) is creating opportunities for more cultural influence and appreciation. Not the type where we do these sad and useless land acknowledgements, but the type where people in various parts of the U.S. learn more about the indigenous cultures of their respective regions and learn to appreciate aspects of those cultures that are still alive today. This could potentially create a larger market for various indigenous cultural performances, concerts, artwork, etc. A good example of this approach is Hawaii, where the indigenous Hawaiian culture is more broadly known, and has had a greater influence on the overall culture of the state, than is the case with the various Native American cultures of the U.S. mainland, and there are various ways in which Native Hawaiians can benefit financially from others' interest in their culture and way of life. I guess a major reason is that in Hawaii, Native Hawaiians make up around 10-20% of the population, which is a number big enough for this kind of cultural influence to be felt, whereas percentages of Native Americans in the U.S. mainland are extremely small. But I believe there is a way to replicate at least some aspects of what works in Hawaii elsewhere.
I grew up in Arkansas, and in grade school, we visited museums focused on Native Americans. I don't remember learning much, but they tried. I took classes in college that were better at driving interest. It wasn't much but I am glad there was something.
We might be different ages - I grew up in Texas - Native Americans were generally described in Texas history books as primitive savages that "good Texans" fought against and tamed. Museums about Native Americans would have been laughed at.
Well, the Comanches and Apaches were pretty wild guys. The original Texans. Their native neighbors were scared of them too.
Aren't Native American peoples especially possessive of their own cultures in a way that other peoples (especially ones which aren't survivors of settler-colonial genocides) are not, to the point that they likely had a significant role in fomenting US progressive paranoia about "cultural appropriation" in the first place?
I was specifically thinking of Hawaii as I read this piece and the enriching personal experiences I have had getting to know Native Hawaiians, witnessing their rituals, and learning about their philosophy towards nature. I have similar positive memories learning about native peoples growing up in the Pacific Northwest. There is value in ways of living that our culture and markets do not in fact value very much, and that is our loss.
You mention markets, but there’s nothing we can do to get a market to value a thing.
Marketing??
They also ran a monarchy till 1893!
It’s truly one of the dumbest, most obviously flawed things that people believe. To say that this land belongs to the X people requires that you arbitrarily pick a year (typically in the 16th to 19th century) and claim that whoever owned the land in that year is the true rightful owner. It’s one of those things I can’t understand how any reasonably intelligent person can do
This is a strange piece. It’s anti ethnic nationalism but pro colonisation, ignoring that fact that there was an ethnic and racial reasons, said and unsaid, for America’s colonisation of the west of North America. This wasn’t in dispute in the 19C.
Has ethnic nationalism lost favour in the post war period? The right to self-determination is an internationally recognized principle enshrined in documents like the United Nations Charter and various human rights treaties. And the self determined people are mostly ethnic groups. Besides this everybody has some nationalist view on most conflicts - like Israel Palestine. Or freeing Tibet which has been off and on part of China for centuries, or keeping the independence of Taiwan where the country itself sees it self as not just Chinese but China. In these cases the larger entity decries the nationalism of the lessor.
Or take Ukraine where it’s Putin who denies the self determination of the Ukrainians by denying they exist in the first place, he puts Ukrainian nationalism as a 19C construct.
Also I’m not sure that most of the world is anti ethno nationalism - it’s more a western ideology driven rather by the needs of commerce than any problems we had with Norway being Norway post war.
It is not pro-colonization.
Taiwan doesn't see itself as any form of China... But China has said they will invade if the island tries to change the name or the claims to the mainland.
Taiwan is still officially named the Republic of China and was recognized by the UN as “China” until 1971. I think that’s, in part, what Peter meant.
And seeing oneself as Chinese (language, culture, food, etc) is different from seeing oneself as part of the PRC or modern day mainland China.
And I am saying that is like when an abused spouse leaves a marriage, but the ex husband says "If you ever get rid of my last name, I will murder you."
You wouldn't look at that person twenty years later and say, "Awww, she still has his last name, she must still love him a little bit."
Taiwan is open about being ethnically Chinese, but they see that as having no bearing on the political issue.
Too often people look at the ROC name and assume it represents current feeling rather than historic pathway dependence and a current threat of violence.
This is changing as the older Chinese identifying population dying off. More and more younger folks (and the current ruling party identify themselves Taiwanese)
The island of Taiwan ( aka Taipei or Formosa ) which had a small native population was first occupied and partially colonized by the Dutch, then the Spanish, then Koxinga of the Ming dynasty, then by the Qing dynasty, then the Japanese empire, and finally by the KuoMinTang who founded the Republic of China. So which Taiwan doesn’t see itself as any form of China, all of them?
I wouldn't call it anti-ethnonationalism or pro-colonisation -- more like pro-status-quo (in ethnographic terms).
In a liberal democracy, self-determination (regardless of ethnicity) is an individual right. Individuals are free to associate and to maintain their customs within that context.
This is interesting and seems broadly true! I appreciate some rebuttals of some of the weaker parts of progressive orthodoxy, and while land acknowledgements are a small thing it's worth pointing out the problems with them.
Your thoughts lately seem to suggest that the road ahead will have a lot of similar battles for the progressive movement. I'd be curious about your thoughts on why the path forward for progressives is about hippie-punching, while conservatives don't seem to be obligated to do an equivalent amount of nazi-punching. It does seem worth poking holes in far-left ideas, but it's notable that the right doesn't seem to pay much political price for tacitly endorsing far-right ideas like The Great Replacement. Is this assymetry true? Is it technological, social, specific to our moment? While I think it's worth doing things like this, it's hard to see a future for the left that relies too much on fighting its own left flank instead of the actual dictators and genuine racist bad guys.
Wokesters (with all their granular rules) aren't hippies!
You'll find more longhaired dudes at a country music concert than in Berkeley. Trust me, I'm gay; I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I'm attracted to hippie types -- not to any so-called "boy" with a vagina.
I get my perspective from the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, & Kafka. So much for any would-be administrative caste policing people's behavior (and language) with a checklist on a clipboard.
As I lament to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore!"
To steelman land acknowledgments, I think the idea behind them (for most people, there are obviously crazies out there as demonstrated by the group the post links to) isn't an expectation that the land will actually ever be returned to the tribes they list in the form of an ethnostate for those tribes; it's more like a generalized, collective apology for the injustices of the past. In my experience, indigenous people who like land acknowledgments like the idea that their continued existence is being acknowledged, but don't expect current occupants to vacate the land for them.
My problem with them is that they tend to be awkwardly shoehorned into contexts where they don't accomplish anything and bring more weird attention to the person making them - like the dance recital mentioned in this post. They actually feel self-important, like someone's random improv show is a big enough occasion to be tied to historical injustice. I think this is why they rub people the wrong way and are called "performative". Moreover, unless you actually intend to vacate the land where you're living or working and give it to indigenous people (which no one does), you're basically saying "this land I live on belongs to this tribe, but I'm not going anywhere, so I guess we're stuck with that". I'm not sure that leads anywhere useful.
I can see there being good contexts for them. For example, a lecture on local history should acknowledge the indigenous history of the area. But I generally see them as a social justice dead-end, and one of those ideas that Democrats should probably distance themselves from in order to regain power.
And when is said apology enough?
Every spot of ground on Earth has been occupied by a different group of people than those on it now. The losers were conquered. People have accepted this reality for millennia. Only the modern, Western liberal feels the need to pretend to care about those their ancestors defeated.
I view these land acknowledgments as the replacement for the "Pledge of Allegiance". If you are old enough, you will recall that the pledge was routinely performed (and was just as performative) before pretty all meetings or group events. City council meeting in 1974: "Pledge of Allegiance". City council meeting in 2024: "Stolen Land Acknowledgement". Wonder what it will be in 2074 (assuming there are still city council meetings)
The way forward is to trade land acknowledgments for just resolutions of broken treaties and stalled land claims. As a Canadian I am proud that we have come to a number of multi-billion dollar settlements for outstanding cases.
For example
https://northernontario.ctvnews.ca/robinson-superior-first-nations-provided-settlement-offer-from-canada-over-annuities-owed-1.7154797
I'm pretty sure I've heard criticism of land acknowledgements somewhere before. Unfortunately, I couldn't hear the criticism well because of all the liberals in the room trying to silence the speaker and declaring that they felt "unsafe" with him on campus. Careful Noah; you're treading near a liberal red-line: "though shalt always side with the intersectionally oppressed."
More seriously, I had never seen land acknowledgements as a form of ethnonationalism, but they are. It's obvious, but genius lies in finding the obvious things that others don't notice. Thanks for that.
Also, in my experience, most people who take their tribal descent seriously actually prefer the term American Indian. I think Native American is kind of like Latinx in that way.
The clearest explanation of why ethnostates such as Israel (or a Palestinian state) are wrong is "This Land Is Mine" by Nina Paley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pKMV6e5kEo
Whenever you hear an "economic" explanation about why something is inefficient, you should remember the ideas of second best economics. Very often, it is propaganda from those who want to streamline the route to monopoly, which could be even more inefficient. Auto dealership requirements, for example, were in part established to remove some of the monopoly power of manufacturers who could otherwise raise prices AND squeeze the dealerships to maximize their profits. Is there a ever clear answer in second best economics? No. But when the alternative is enlarging a monopoly, countervailing forces that distribute the income more widely seem like a good idea to help keep monopolies in check.
Using tribal organizations as a fig leaf for evading zoning and other regulations is another example of second-best economics. The down side is that it can cause all sorts of externalities that would be protected by law. Which externalities would be worse, those with or those without that zoning evasion? That's not easy to discern. Not to mention the fact that tribal organizations are themselves obviously the ethnostates that Noah decries.
One of my favorites. Thanks for linking it again.
It's very hard for modern Westerners to accept "to the victor go the spoils", but their own society (and every other) exists because millennia of their ancestors had so such moral difficulties. European liberal democracy wouldn't exist without brutal military conflict, both historically and as recently as WWII.
I love that Nina Paley cartoon.