No, Land Acknowledgements Aren’t Woke Overreach. Here’s Why.
Source: ChatGPT
I need to make one thing perfectly clear before I continue here. I really, really hate the word “woke.” As far as I can tell, this monosyllabic word has drifted far from its original meaning to refer to a cornucopia of progressive ideas, which range from the completely reasonable to the patently ridiculous, that those on the right don’t like. Anymore in the current anti-woke climate, calling something “woke” is a lazy attempt to dismiss an idea merely because it comes from the progressive left. It’s a way of saying “I don’t like this but I couldn’t be bothered to form a coherent critique of Idea X.”
Those of you who have followed me on social media and on my old platform on Medium should know that my social and political views run the gamut from stances typically classified as “conservative” to ones typical of the card-carrying left. I’m happy to call anyone any pronoun they want me to, but can also recognize that socio-political discourse on gender went completely bananas on the left, with potentially harmful repercussions to young people. I’m pro-police and pro-public safety while at the same time supportive of humane treatment of homeless and addicted populations. And I’ve always been staunchly supportive of Israel’s right to a peaceful existence in the historical Jewish homeland while at the same time castigating the Netanyahu government for its hypocritical attacks on democracy and secularism at home.
I think of myself as a sensible centrist on most issues and am critical of what I see as intellectual laziness on both the left and the right. As such, I found myself mainly chiding the left five years ago when so-called wokeness was very much in the ascendancy, but now mainly find myself taking the right to task with its blanket rejection of anything that’s been a recent product of the progressive left without really thinking it through.
The Case for Land Acknowledgements
One issue that I’m increasingly seeing under scrutiny from the conservative wing is land acknowledgements. Just to be clear, even on this issue I don’t believe we should be shaming anyone into this or similar practices, if for no other reason because it’s virtually guaranteed to provoke the sort of backlash that we’re currently seeing. But yes, I do think it should be encouraged in a positive way, and I make no apologies for saying so. As somebody who has worked in communications for nearly two decades, I recognize the power of words and storytelling, and as a storytelling tool, land acknowledgements are a powerful salve for historical wounds.
As far as I can tell, critics of land acknowledgements take the following view—that acknowledging historical Indigenous native-ness of any given piece of land (for example, the city of Edmonton, where I live) is tantamount to saying that anyone living there who’s not Indigenous (or even of Indigenous background from somewhere else) is a trespasser and a hypocrite for not immediately packing up and leaving for wherever their ancestors came from. In other words, their message seems to be “either move out or shut up.” I’ve even heard this argument from people whose views I normally agree with, like comedian and news commentator Bill Maher, so it seems to be an increasingly prevalent view.
I think this view is inherently wrongheaded for a number of reasons. For one, that’s not even remotely what land acknowledgements are suggesting. While the history of preliminary interactions between Indigenous people and settlers are as varied as the people themselves, in the case of northern Alberta, where I live, early contact between the Cree, Dene, and other Indigenous peoples and early European migrants were largely peaceful, an experience that translated into a treaty system that recognized all peoples’ right to inhabit the land in question. All the land acknowledgements I hear in my neck of the woods note that the land where I live is Treaty 6 territory, a treaty that was entered into by equal partners. Of course, the original spirit of these treaties was rarely (if ever) held up, and that’s kind of the point of a land acknowledgement—it’s an attempt to get back to the original spirit of these accords.
Here’s another reason why those who oppose land acknowledgements out of an allergy to all things “woke” should reconsider their stance. Land acknowledgements aren’t a new social norm that was dreamed up by a bunch of white leftist university professors keen to dispense with their colonial guilt, nor are they really a product of the broader “decolonization” movement. They’re a direct response to the recommendations brought forward by the National Truth and Reconciliation campaign led by Indigenous leaders who took great care to air out the country’s dirty laundry with minimal fingerpointing. This is no different from the work done by the likes of Nelson Mandela in post-Apartheid South Africa, in which ways were sought to address historical injury without assigning blame and offer helpful remedies. And Mandela was hardly a woke scold.
Want a third reason not to reject land acknowledgements? How about the fact that they’re, well, just words? Nobody has ever been harmed by a land acknowledgement. Sure, some have taken it too far and shamed people for not using them, and that’s obviously wrong, but from my standpoint a simple acknowledgement of indigeneity is the least someone like me can do to help right historic wrongs. To refuse to give one is, to me, tantamount to claiming that there are no historical wrongs that need be acknowledged, a claim that only a wholly ignorant person would make.
Why Stop at Land Acknowledgements?
Personally—and this is probably where I depart from the majority view—I believe that land acknowledgements are a good start but that far more needs to be done to correct for the sins of history. I’ve argued elsewhere that all Canadian children regardless of ethnic or cultural background, probably starting in junior high, should be required to study an Indigenous language, ideally something native to their own region. In Edmonton that would mean the Cree language. In Vancouver that would mean one of the numerous dialects of Straits Salish. In some places, it gets more complicated, like the Calgary region, where Blackfoot, Stoney Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina were all once widely spoken.
This is scarcely a fringe idea. Countries like Ireland and New Zealand have done much through their educational systems to curb language death, in their cases of Irish Gaelic and the Māori language. In Greenland, which now enjoys de facto autonomy from former colonial masters Denmark, even students of white Scandinavian settler background are required to learn Kalaallisut (the Greenlandic Inuit language), which is now the sole official language in the territory. Heck, Israel went so far as to resurrect a dead language as an official tongue of the Jewish state. Of course things are more complicated in Canada than they are in, say, New Zealand and Greenland, whose Indigenous populations are united by a common language, because even within a single city you often have more than one traditional Indigenous language. But where there’s a will there’s a way.
Still on the subject of language, I’ve argued elsewhere that a city like Edmonton could lead the way in cultural healing by adopting Cree as an official language and do what the Irish did by adopting Indigenous nomenclature into official and ceremonial parlance. Personally I would love to see signage in my city in Cree syllabics. Aside from just looking cool, it would be an enormous boon for language revitalization at a time when most Indigenous languages are threatened with extinction. New Zealand now has bilingual announcements on public transportation. Why don’t we? Sure, we don’t need it in the sense that there are probably no more monolingual Cree speakers left, but it would be sending the right message, in my opinion.
Compared to what we could be doing, and what many other jurisdictions around the world have done, to use language to right past wrongs, I think land acknowledgements are a pretty small ask.
Land Acknowledgement and the Evolution of Communication
Land acknowledgements form one part of a cluster of new socio-political norms and practices that have emerged over the past decade, along with stating one’s preferred pronouns in social media bios and email signatures and the like, which are all wrapped up in what those on the right tend to dismiss as “woke.” As I discussed earlier, so-called wokeness is a truly mixed bag, consisting of some things that make perfect sense to me, some that seem well-meaning but excessive, and some that are downright incorrect and harmful.
It’s also worth noting that this is par for the course of any social movement. Consider, for example, the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, which produced two notable linguistic innovations, one of which stuck and the other didn’t. One very rarely sees the word “womyn” spelled with a Y these days but there was a bona fide movement to change the spelling of the word “women” to remove the word “men” from it, even though this never really made etymological sense. By contrast, the attempted replacement of the titles Miss and Mrs with the marital status-neutral Ms did stick to the extent that the aforementioned titles now have a decidedly anachronistic ring to them. As always, some innovations stick while others are discarded.
Land acknowledgement, I believe, are among those innovations of recent times that have lasting power. Consider the fact that Indigenous land acknowledgements are becoming increasingly common in places like Norway and Taiwan, countries with little in common other than a legacy of suppressing Indigenous cultures like the Sámi in northern Scandinavia and the Taiwanese Aborigines. In Australia they call them “Welcome to Country” salutations and they’re now pretty much standard across the political spectrum. Despite a backlash to such acknowledgements coming from the right side of the spectrum in North America, they’re very much in the ascendancy elsewhere around the globe and appear to be here to stay.
Maybe, just maybe, under different political leadership, both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs will offer land acknowledgements spanning the breadth of the Holy Land, acknowledging the fact that Jews and Arabs share indigeneity in the lands they inhabit. While this is almost unimaginable in the current socio-political reality, it makes perfect sense and would be a small gesture that could work towards healing the intergenerational trauma that plagues that part of the world.
The stakes are a hell of a lot lower here in Canada than they are in Israel and Palestine. Nobody’s holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing anyone to wax poetic about Treaty 6 this and that. It’s simply an easy thing to do that sends a positive message that is not at all synonymous with “white people should pack up and go back to Europe.” I mean, can’t we just be decent human beings to each other? Also, can we please stop using “woke” as a blanket condemnation of a bunch of things that have little if anything to do with each other? We’re all quite capable of having mature discussions on individual issues, whether it’s gender and sports, immigration, or Middle Eastern geopolitics. I for one really try.
