At this time last year, I was scrambling so hard to get everything done that I straight up closed the library for the last week and a half of school. This year, I'm better at my job. Better enough that instead of closing the library, I'm mostly sitting here being bored in it.
It is a library. It is hard to stay bored in.
I've spent the last couple days learning about the US Public Lands Survey System (PLSS). If you live in one of the states with mostly square or rectangular counties within which townships are also mostly square or rectangular, you're in a PLSS-surveyed place.
I got interested after finding an 1847 plat map that included my parents' farm, the one I grew up on. And then remembering that my mother has always claimed their farm originated as payment to some soldier for his service in the War of 1812. But the area wasn't even PLSS-surveyed until the 1820s. And then I remembered the first Treaty of Chicago wasn't signed until 1821. And then I was like "so when exactly did this poor bastard (FN1) get handed this land, and who was *actually* there before, if anyone?"
Annnnyway, this brings me to land acknowledgements.
In case you haven't had the privilege(FN2), a "land acknowledgement" is when White people say out loud that they're on land that belongs, and/or once belonged, and/or was swiped from, Indigenous people. Around here, they are the most awkward expression of "we will feel vaguely bad in order to absolve ourselves of actually doing anything" you can possibly imagine.
Or, as Graeme Wood more artfully put it:
One might declare before, say, a corporate sales retreat: We would like to respectfully acknowledge that the land on which we gather to discuss the new line of sprinkler systems is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. The acknowledgment is almost always a prepared statement, read verbatim, because like all spells it must be spoken precisely for its magic to work. The magic in this case is self-absolution: The acknowledgment relieves the speaker and the audience of the responsibility to think about Indigenous peoples, at least until the next public event.
Graeme Wood, 'Land Acknowledgments' Are Just Moral Exhibitionism (The Atlantic, probably paywalled)
The first time I encountered a land acknowledgement, I was at an outdoor summer concert. The local symphony was playing in one of the parks downtown. I sat on the edge of one of the fountains. Behind me, maybe fifty feet away, were the remains of a bona fide "Indian mound" that predates the arrival of the Potawatomi.
White people have been busy messing with this mound for centuries. It's a fraction of its original size, the rest having been leveled for White people's convenience. It currently has a time capsule buried in it - put there in the 1950s to replace the previous time capsule, put there in the 1850s. Someone on the city council recently proposed "landscaping" it with flowers and the like.
The "land acknowledgment" followed Wood's example almost exactly. The speaker read it in a voice both patronizing and aggrieved. "We all need to feel bad about this because feeling bad about it makes us good people and you're a bad person for not feeling bad about this sooner," was the tone.
Then we all listened to some Sousa.
I have also, this week, been reading Voice on the Water: Great Lakes Native America Now. It's an anthology of writers and artists from the various Great Lakes tribes, published in 2011.
Northern Michigan University Center for Native American Studies: Voice on the Water
Reading this book, which mentions places I know and love both as they are now and as they were in the past, brought me back to that weird discomfort about land acknowledgments. I spent a chunk of yesterday contemplating that.
I do not see what "feel vaguely bad but do nothing" accomplishes for anyone or anything. One Reddit comment I found yesterday argued that it plays the long game: hearing regular land acknowledgments turns "this land belonged/belongs to these people" into a subconscious given, making it easier to argue for real change later. First, I don't know if I buy that. Second, even if I do, I'm sick of the claim that incremental change is all we can hope for. It smacks of the "white moderate" Dr. King describes in A Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Yet I don't want to dismiss land acknowledgements completely. I think they might have some value as a lead-in to relevant related topics. I can, for example, picture teaching students how to put together Three Sisters plantings by explaining "the Potawatomi figured out this one works here, in this soil and climate, particularly well, and they did that by doing it over and over again while living here. They still do." There are times and places where it's important to see the long view - to understand where we came from and how we are related to the land on which we now live.
I'm just never likely to deliver a "land acknowledgment" as a vaguely accusatory two-sentence lecture preceding an unrelated event. That's weird. And it doesn't make me want to join a coalition with the speaker, even if the speaker is someone with the power to make real changes. Not even when I otherwise agree with the project.
Tl;dr Recommended: Voice on the Water. Not recommended: vague White people guilt, Sousa.
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FN1: I imagine this poor guy cried when he saw it. It's forty acres, officially. In reality, all but about 12 of those acres are straight up the side of a 50-foot pile of glacial till. Great place if you want to start a gravel company; useless if you want to farm.
FN2: lol
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