Acknowledgments

Short post tonight. My working group session went well!

I had some crisis thoughts before it around the issue of land acknowledgement, where  we start the session (as we started the conference) with a statement of our awareness that we're holding the conference on lands that historically were the home and purview of X indigenous peoples. There's lots of different versions, and a helpful site helps you determine what people get acknowledged.

I'm ambivalent about the gesture. Well, let me explain. It's incontestably true that the lands we call North America were not empty when Europeans came to colonize. It's likewise true that disease and aggression (and malice and bad faith and awful acts) eradicated the majority of people living here originally, forcing the survivors into migrations and resettlements, breaking contracts, and generally treating the survivors and their descendants abominably. Finally, it's also the case that indigenous people remain with us, existing in these shoved-aside places and generally marginalized in a settler-colonial context.

I'm for non-indigenous people--especially white people of European descent--acknowledging this. It should be drilled into the consciousness of every USAmerican child: this country was founded upon, and in many ways still participates in, acts of genocide and slavery.

The problem isn't in the acknowledgment itself; it's in the way that the acknowledgement becomes a kind of rote virtue-signalling by woke, usually majority-white organizations. Such organizations often incorporate acknowledgements in to their routines without doing anything else to redress the wrongs of settler colonialism. It becomes like a bizarre, insincere apology: "I acknowledge that I am stepping on your foot right now. As I continue to tread upon your feet, I will keep in mind your pain."

There's also the vexed historical question of how to determine just who gets acknowledged. This New Yorker article touches on some of the problems of translating modern notions of ownership and boundary to pre-Columbian indigenous life. It isn't like indigenous people lived in stable, perfect harmony with each other. They're human, after all. Tribes occasionally warred with other tribes, took over land, migrated into other tribes' territories, and intermingled homes. Some of the historiographic stakes of deciding who "really" owns this land involve inter-tribal politics whose influence continues to the present.

This conference, for example, credits the Pamunkey people. The site I linked to earlier (the one universally pointed to as authoritative), however, lists the Nacotchtank people. I can't pretend to have any expertise in this area. Who's right? My Wikipedia searching indicates the possible reason for the conference's choice. The Pamunkey people still exist (there are a little under 200 of them) here, having gained federal recognition status in 2016. Thus the official statement from the conference organizers describes this land as "the unceded traditional lands" of the Pamunkey. The Nacotchtank were the people here when settlers landed. Devastated by disease and aggression, they disappeared. Thus (if I'm right--and I could very well be off here), it seems like the Pamunkey get credit by virtue of their continued existence. That's not nothing, but it seems unfair that the Nacotchtank get forgotten by virtue of their eradication by white people.

There's no entirely perfect answer here, if by perfect we mean "just." There's a fundamental, unforgivable injustice inherent in this country, and an acknowledgment alone will hardly help that.

So I'm ambivalent.

Ultimately, though, acknowledgment is better than silence. Here's what I said:

As we are encouraged to do, we acknowledge the Indigenous lands where we’re holding this conference. We are on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank people and the unceded traditional lands of the Pamunkey people. I have a lot of ambivalence about the act of land acknowledgement. It discomforts me—as it should, in productive ways. It behooves me as a white person in settler colonial contexts to remember that my existence depends on injustices, past and ongoing, committed against other people. Indigenous activists, however, caution that even this awareness, even this discomfort, can become come as rote and unthinking as the act of acknowledgement can be. I may all too easily fold the discomfort I feel into the background noise of existential guilt that founds my multiply privileged identity. I can feel some guilt--and move on. The gesture of redress and reconciliation the acknowledgment intends to be can too easily paste over or excuse the genocide—not a crisis, but a crime—that preceded it.