The Dual Nature of Land Acknowledgments

Land acknowledgments—formal statements admitting that Native Americans once owned the land a person is standing on—have become a fixture of commencements, public meetings, and websites. Yet ever since they became pervasive (around 2020), they have been controversial—among both conservatives and progressives, including Native Americans. 

While I agree with many of the critics, I think the acknowledgments have done a service, and I’ll tell you why in this article.

Land acknowledgments go like this (excerpted from a slightly longer statement): 

The University of Minnesota campuses were built on the traditional homelands of the Dakota and Ojibwe, and scores of other Indigenous peoples who have walked on these lands from time immemorial. It is important to acknowledge the peoples on whose land we live, learn, and work as we seek to improve and strengthen our relations with our tribal nations.

Others are more outspoken. From the University of Michigan-Dearborn:

We acknowledge the painful history of ethnocide and forced occupation and appropriation of territory and the accompanying degradation of its resources. We honor these nations’ past, present, and future generations along with other Indigenous Peoples, who have lived here in harmony with nature for millennia.

You get the idea. Land acknowledgments took hold on this continent following a major Canadian report in 2015 on the historical mistreatment of Native Canadians (acknowledgments had appeared earlier in Australia). They received an enormous push in 2020 when High Country News, a nonprofit newspaper based in Colorado, published an accounting of the lands that fueled the nation’s land-grant universities.

That report, “Land-Grab Universities,” could not be ignored. A team led by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone meticulously detailed which lands the federal government had turned over to the states under the 1862 Morrill Act—and how the federal government had obtained those lands. The Morrill Act authorized the federal government to give land to the states for agricultural and technical education. The states could build on the land, or they could sell it, with revenues to be used for such teaching.

Many, many universities obtained lands that Indians had “ceded,” usually after a war or other confrontation. This is the kind of detail Lee and Ahtone presented:

Colorado, for instance, located nearly half of Colorado State University’s grant on land taken from the Arapaho and Cheyenne less than a year after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which U.S. forces brutally murdered more than 200 members of those tribes.

And: 

Four Dakota bands signed treaties at Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, Minnesota, in the summer of 1851, relinquishing nearly all Dakota territory in Mni Sota Makoce, “The Land Where the Waters Reflect the Clouds.” They did so in response to the withholding of rations, the threat of violence, enforced starvation, the killing of game and the destruction of agriculture. Call it coercion.

(Note: Abraham Lincoln soon authorized the execution of 39 Dakota Indians. All but one were hanged.) 

The Negatives

To many observers, acknowledgments are “performative,” “virtue-signaling,” a way of removing white guilt—they are just words. Regretfully, write Theresa Jean Ambo and Stephen M. Gavazzi, they “can be viewed as a multicultural or social justice practice, a part of a ‘checklist,’ if you will, that is void of real or meaningful political, legal, or structural change. . . .”

More fundamentally, making such acknowledgments flies in the face of the law of conquest, a principle of international law until the mid-20th century. Once parties signed treaties, the conqueror was properly in control. So why the apologies?

And Indian tribes were conquerors themselves. “The Tuscarora tribe of the Iroquois Confederation conquered south to the Carolinas, displacing the original inhabitants there,” writes Jay Schalin. “Out in the Southwest, the Comanches drove the Apaches off their lands. Of course, the Apaches had already driven off the prior residents after migrating from the north.”

The Positives

But on the positive side, acknowledgments have made the public more aware of the role of American Indians in American history. To me, that matters.

Most of us know about the Battle of Wounded Knee or the Battle of the Little Bighorn, skirmishes of the late 19th century. But have you heard of King Philip’s War, the Yamasee War, Pontiac’s War, the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Creek War, or the Black Hawk War? All of these took place before 1850!

As an avocational historian, I keep history books to see what past historians were thinking about. A classic text is The Growth of the American Republic by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William H. Leuchtenberg. In the first volume of the 1980 edition, which ends with Reconstruction, I found 211 references to American Indians. In contrast, Congress had only 31 references, and the Republican Party, 21. Paul Johnson’s 1997 The History of the American People had 41 references to Indians, none to Congress, and 31 to the U.S. Constitution.

The books (especially Morison et al.) deplore the horror and tragedy of the wars, but also indicate that Indians could be cruelly violent, too. 

Native Americans’ lives were interwoven with most of American history. They did not just “vanish.” Yet settler-Indian interactions are often viewed as peripheral to American history. The fact that there are so many references to American Indians in these books may be because their appearances, while frequent, are fleeting.

Such conflicts come across as mere way stations on American settlers’ journey to their “manifest destiny.” But surely there’s more to them than that.