What does acknowledging our ancestors’ sins do?
It is no coincidence that voicing “land acknowledgements” to launch academic and corporate meetings has become fashionable during the progressive resurgence of the past eight years.
It’s also no coincidence that such nods to past conquests find greater support among very young adults — the generation whose sports events eschewed winners and losers, in favor of “participation trophies” for all. For them, having power means you must have hurt someone to get it. Power equals guilt.
That’s my generation’s fault, by the way. Born into the post-World War II “Pax Americana” and thrilled by the fall of the Soviet Union, we imagined our children would never know war. We were ordering their fall soccer season’s participation trophies when the Twin Towers fell.
The sad truth of history is that humans are constantly at war. Usually it is waged so one group of people can take land and natural resources from another. Sometimes it is to expand a religion or ideology, but even then — because even vanquished humans occupy physical space — the war results in the conquest of land.
Uncomfortable with war
We blessed inhabitants of the West are uncomfortable with the reemergence of war’s reality. Those older than 40 remember a world mostly at peace, with small wars here and there. Treating this as the natural state of the world, we somehow raised a couple of generations nearly unable to handle conflict.
This is why old and young alike are stunned by the territorial wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Hadn’t the free world moved past that kind of thing?
We don’t agree on how to resolve those conflicts, but we agree in our tremendous dismay. The generational divide reappears, however, when the land in question is the patch of earth we’re standing on. The divide, moreover, isn’t just generational; it quickly becomes ideological.
The wording and tone of acknowledgements vary. Meanings seem to range from “We feel maybe we shouldn’t even be here” to “We deeply regret that our great-great-grandparents’ government was a bunch of lying, murdering thieves.” (While others say, in effect, “Tough — we won.”)
The finest land acknowledgement I’ve ever seen is from City Alight, the extraordinary music program of St. Paul’s Castle Hill, an Anglican church in Sydney, Australia: “We acknowledge the Darug people, the traditional custodians of the land on which we live, work, and gather, and we pay our respects to their elders, past, present, and future. We are honoured to sing to and worship God here.”
Just a few minutes spent researching the Darug, or Dharug, yields stories of the British settlers’ atrocities against this Aboriginal tribe. These Anglicans know they can’t atone for other people’s sins, so they don’t try to. Their acknowledgement seems sincere, rather than performative or perfunctory.
Perhaps that’s because it is in print rather than live. Perhaps that’s also because it’s a voluntary expression from like-minded people. Such is not the case in any large corporation, nor even in the mostly homogenous world of academe.
The quest to atone
Stuart Reges, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, made headlines in 2022 when his send-up, in a course syllabus, of the university’s recommended acknowledgement led to his free-speech lawsuit against them.
Mr. Reges’s version said, “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”
Without resorting to labor theory at all, other free-thinking people have observed that many Native American tribes themselves fought constantly over land. And didn’t they migrate to North America from other continents? How far back should we go to establish ownership rights?
The people of Rhode Island need never apologize because the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes both willingly gave the land settled by English separatist Roger Williams, out of gratitude for his friendship and help.
And perhaps the people of Illinois might shrug off pioneers’ misdeeds knowing the native tribes fought so much that, historians tell us, long before Europeans arrived, one-third or more of all skeletal remains in their burial sites indicate death by violent injury. (That is, arrowheads and hatchet marks in skulls.)
The same is true in parts of Alabama, Michigan, Northern California, across the Great Plains and in other places.
I don’t doubt that for some the quest to atone for our ancestors is sincere. A survey in Canada found that while 41% of 18-to-24 years old have presented a land acknowledgement, only 20% of the 25-to-34 bracket have, and five percent of those over 75.
But ideological warriors often exploit the young. Young people uncomfortable with power imbalances in general can be manipulated by those who oppose the West’s power in particular and would like to see it retract, or utterly fail.
Our charge
This is obvious when so many on the left, old as well as young, support Ukraine but reflexively oppose Israel. Likewise on what remains of “the right,” where passionate support of Israel conflicts, in some circles, with admiration for Vladimir Putin.
We can’t undo crimes of the past. It may be good to acknowledge them. But our charge is to resist evil here and now, from without and within.