I’m Native American. Land Acknowledgments Are Infuriating.
Conservatives who critique land acknowledgments aren’t acting in good faith, but they do have a point.
Mr. Walker is a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.
The guide acknowledged that we were standing on the ancestral homelands of the Munsee Lenape. He was a careful man in a careful place: the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, the Rockefeller family’s church at the edge of their Kykuit estate in the Hudson Valley of New York. The morning light on the pews streamed in through stained glass windows by Matisse and Chagall. A few people in the group glanced at me, the Native person in the room, as if to gauge whether what we’d just heard was acceptable.
“We’d like to think they are looking down on us, pleased with what we have done with the land,” the guide concluded his acknowledgment.
I thought about pulling him aside afterward, but my patience was low and I didn’t want to get into it on the first day of a multiday art tour.
He had named the Munsee Lenape, the broader people of the region. But the particular community of that ground, the Weckquaesgeek, went unmentioned.
Most land acknowledgments don’t end with the suggestion that the displaced are smiling down from heaven, grateful for what replaced them. But the moment captured, in exaggerated form, something that can happen even in more careful versions of the practice. A ritual meant to recognize dispossession becomes a form of reassurance instead. History is named and then absorbed.