The problem is with its content, though. I’ve yet to see a strong argument against land acknowledgements. People are understandably afraid they’ll get fired if they make one, and I am too, but fear must have its limits and truth its rights. The practice is dubious in every way. A “land” is controlled by one polity at a time. A class in that polity may seek to legitimate its rule and its own supposedly superior moral taste by demonizing its precursors and even the polity’s very founding, making elaborate shows of disingenuous xenophilia rife with “noble savage” fantasies of the kind to which out-of-touch elite classes are so prone, but this is a dangerous game and should be resisted by anyone who wishes the polity to meaningfully persist. As I wrote in my essay on Silko’s Ceremony:
When we encounter a reflux of romantic nationalism in a Native American text—as we do because, Treuer reminds us, Native American literature is a modern literature—why are we expected to nod along cheerfully, even though it rightly disturbs us when we find it in the likes of Heidegger or Yeats (who also, we might remember, enlisted indigenous myth on behalf of a colonized and dispossessed people)? I contend that such courteous indifference to political dynamite is the patronizing gesture par excellence of the white liberal. We only quarrel with those we regard as equals; with those we consider inferior, we smile politely no matter what they say—because what do we have to fear from them?
The land, anyway, has seen only a succession of regimes and trespassers, wars, foundings, and usurpations. (I am aware that some Native American communities regard themselves as autochthonous; I won’t go out of my way to insult their or anyone else’s faith but neither will I condescend by pretending I believe it myself.) The conceptual dyad of indigenous-settler is therefore both wishful and incoherent. It lacks the political and moral high ground it claims for itself when one compares it with the aforementioned romantic-nationalist ideologies of blood and soil that obviously inform it. With indigeneity’s anti-diasporic logic, it is an unavoidably fascist concept. As I wrote in my essay on Roth’s Plot Against America:
If the word “indigenous”—and its recently fashionable, all-explanatory antonym “settler colonialism”—unavoidably connotes land and lineage as identitarian essence, then any diaspora is illegitimate as such, an inorganic interloper on someone’s sacred soil, even if the soil has never witnessed anything other than a succession of trespassers claiming primacy since time began. Roth implicitly defends America as an inherently diasporic nation, a nation that is—to quote one of modern fiction’s most iconic Jewish cosmopolites—“the same people living in the same place,” nothing less and nothing more...
When those ultra-right-wing black metal musicians in Scandinavia burned down churches, they did so in the name of indigeneity, because they thought Christianity a Jewish/Oriental imposition on Wotan’s territory. Their arson was, in that way, the ultimate land acknowledgement. I confess to being biased—I do not speak the language, practice the religion, or live on the land of my forebears, and I don’t lament it either—but I will not be “acknowledging” that my citizenship is somehow illegitimate, especially when it involves the ridiculous hypocrisy that I don’t plan to do anything about this crime, which I did not in any case commit.
