All sales final
Land acknowledgments breed resentment, not reconciliation for Indigenous people
This column will not begin with an acknowledgement that readers are on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Neutral and Haudenosaunee peoples. Or that we are merely guests on their land.
I don’t make visitors stand in the doorway while I list off the various families who’ve previously owned my house before welcoming them in. That would be tedious and irrelevant. Why do it in public on a bigger scale?
And yet land acknowledgement statements have suddenly become de rigueur before classes, concerts, church services, conferences, board meetings et cetera. Some claim they’re now a second, tuneless, national anthem.
This comes at the urging of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which claims they’re necessary to promote greater understanding between Indigenous peoples and the rest of Canada. In truth, they’re doing the exact opposite.
Two weeks ago, as part of Wilfrid Laurier University’s ongoing convulsions over free speech on campus, the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry invited Frances Widdowson, a fearlessly provocative professor from Mount Royal University in Calgary, to discuss the need to think critically about how universities incorporate the commission’s reconciliation demands.
Widdowson spoke passionately about the need to improve health care and education for Indigenous communities, but bristled at efforts that impose native dogma or ‘ways of knowing’ on the academy. What does it mean, for example, to indigenize nuclear physics?
Regarding mandatory land acknowledgments at universities and elsewhere, Widdowson says the practice “leads to resentment, not reconciliation.”
Many Canadians, tending to politeness, go along with these statements as a purely symbolic gesture to show they care about Indigenous issues. “It seems like a nice thing to do,” she says.
Within native society, however, Widdowson argues these statements are taken at face value — as legitimate recognition of moral and legal authority over all Canadian land. “Some Indigenous people will argue land acknowledgement statements mean they actually own the land,” says Widdowson. “but that will come as news to anyone who holds the deed to their house.”
Given these dramatically divergent interpretations — symbolic demonstration of concern or concrete acceptance of universal title — the end result can only be greater misunderstanding. And possibly a reckoning.
“What happens 10 years down the road,” asks Widdowson, “when some Indigenous people suggest it’s time we start paying rent on this land, given that we’ve admitted over and over again that it isn’t really ours?”
Land acknowledgments are also becoming a way to control debate. When giving a talk at another university, Widdowson was told that, as a guest on Indigenous land, she could only say things her ‘hosts’ agreed with.
And following a recent vote by the Ontario Medical Association rejecting land acknowledgments prior to their meetings, critics instantly claimed this to be proof of widespread racism in the doctors’ organization.
Once upon a time you had to do something explicitly racist to be declared one. Now anyone who simply chooses not to parrot land acknowledgement statements can be smeared with this horrible epithet. Widdowson properly calls this “politically correct totalitarianism.”
Finally, many land acknowledgment statements fail as honest history.
The standard claim in Waterloo Region is that we’re on the “traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Neutral and Haudenosaunee peoples.”
In fact, the Haudenosaunee people in the Grand River area today were originally from New York state. Chief Joseph Brant and his Mohawk warriors (of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) were allies of the British during the American Revolution. When that ended in defeat, Brant asked the British Crown to relocate his people.
So in 1784, Governor-General Frederick Haldimand bought a tract of land 10 kilometres wide on either side of the Grand River from the Mississauga (a.k.a. Anishinaabe), as a new home for the Haudenosaunee.
Brant and his 2,000 followers showed up around the same time as many white loyalist refugees were also making their way to southwestern Ontario to claim British land grants.
They are no more ‘traditional’ owners of the land than anyone else living on land bought from someone else.
The Mississauga had held sovereignty over the Grand River area since 1700, but “did grant, bargain, sell, alien, release and confirm unto His said Majesty” the entire tract for £1,180. This was an outright land sale, no different from selling your house today.
As for the little-known Neutrals, they were indeed the original residents of this land. But they were wiped out in wars and had their land stolen by other native tribes long before any European settlers arrived.
All this makes for a rather awkward land acknowledgement claim.
Finally, some people like to point out that Indigenous groups today control a mere sliver of the original 385,000 hectares of the Haldimand Tract, suggesting they were somehow swindled. And while the details of the land deal are endlessly complicated, it was always Brant’s plan (backed by hereditary chiefs) to sell off large chunks of the tract to attract white settlers into his new territory “for the purposes of making roads, raising provisions and teaching us the benefits of agriculture.”
Brant sold the land because he wanted to bring white and native societies closer together; and in doing so, give his people the opportunity to learn and prosper from western culture and technology. Maybe someday we’ll acknowledge that.