Land Acknowledgments
Why they’re a terrible idea
The idea that “first to arrive” is somehow sacred is demonstrably ridiculous. If you really believe this, then do you also believe America is indigenous to, and is sole possessor of, the Moon, and anyone else who arrives is an imperialist colonial aggressor?
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Noah Smith has a great piece on his Substack making the case against land acknowledgments. The key idea is that the moral principle underpinning this ubiquitous practice is ethnonationalism - something that, in other contexts, its advocates would not endorse, to put it mildly. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite, but the whole thing is well worth reading.
The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest... To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.
This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land... If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.
If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? … And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? …
I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups…
Of course you can assign land ownership this way - it’s called an “ethnostate”. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen - a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.
Smith then comes to land acknowledgments.
“Land acknowledgements” have become ubiquitous in progressive spaces and institutions...
[T]he moral principle to which they appeal is ethnonationalism - it’s the idea that plots of land are the rightful property of ethnic groups…
[W]hat should we think of the morality of following the principles behind land acknowledgements to their logical conclusion? “Decolonization” of the land of the U.S. would likely be an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests — there are 330 million people here now, and almost none of them descend from Native Americans. An attempt to dispossess 330 million people would inevitably involve violence on a colossal scale…
Once the logic of land acknowledgements and “decolonization” is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice; it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.
You can read the whole piece here:
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