Land acknowledgements serve no useful purpose and are ahistorical and reductive, distorting both the past and the present. Let’s start with the past. It is true that the European colonists drove the Nonotuck from the Pioneer Valley through a violent and indeed genocidal campaign. However, it would be wrong to designate the land as permanently and inviolably belonging to the Nonotuck. Tragically, the violent conquest of land has been a common feature of human history. Contrary to the misleading (and frankly, infantilizing) stereotype of peaceful Indigenous peoples living in harmony. Precolumbian America was just as violent a place as medieval Europe. Massacres and wars were commonplace, and indeed, many tribes practiced hereditary slavery.

None of this in any way justifies or excuses the horrendous acts perpetrated by European colonists. What it should do, however, is add some context. Virtually every acre of land on earth has been violently seized countless times by spear, bayonet, or assault rifle. Because we don’t know the names of the tribes to come before the Nonotuck, we imply that the Nonotuck inhabited the Pioneer valley forever. If applied anywhere where history is better documented, land acknowledgments are transparently absurd. Is every event in Baghdad supposed to begin with an acknowledgment that “the land on which we stand is Sumerian, Akkadian, Amorite, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Abbasid, Khwarazmian, Qoyunlu, and Ottoman land?” To tie land to any one group of people is both ahistorical and reductive. It suggests a kind of permanent ethno-ownership of land that most Amherst students would find absurd in any other context.

What’s more, by fixating on physical ground, land acknowledgments insinuate that the worst act of the colonists was to steal land, rather than to massacre and enslave those living on it.

Activists will say that the point of land acknowledgments is less about history and more about the present. Land acknowledgments, so the argument goes, raise awareness of the systemically unfair conditions experienced by Indigenous peoples today. However, land acknowledgments are not an effective way to achieve that important and worthwhile goal.

Land acknowledgments don’t inspire a sense of contrition and a desire to fix the problems caused by colonialism. If anything, they are a kind of self-satisfied virtue signaling. They don’t signify a commitment to anything and offer no concrete policy recommendations. Much of the popularity of land acknowledgments stems from the fact that they seem socially conscious while actually promising nothing. For example, the 2021 Microsoft Ignite Conference began with a land acknowledgment. It’s perplexing enough when ordinary students make land declarations, yet when a multibillion-dollar corporation makes the same empty declaration, the idea descends into self-parody.

Land acknowledgments serve as a kind of Rorschach test, enabling people to read whatever they want into the brief, ambiguous statement. That way, radical student activists can join hands with Microsoft executives in giving passionate land acknowledgments. Everyone feels better at the end, but no one has sacrificed a thing. The logical conclusion of the declaration is “this is your land, but we’re keeping it.”

I’m not alone in criticizing land acknowledgments. Even many Indigenous leaders oppose them, seeing them as a simplistic, performative, and ultimately meaningless gesture that distracts from more important issues facing modern Indigenous political groups.

Instead of mindless and superficial land acknowledgments, let’s talk about real, concrete issues. I would love to see a serious debate about whether Amherst should donate part of its endowment to Indigenous advocacy groups, give up part of its land, or in some other way attempt to undo the damage of its past. These would be harder discussions and might leave us feeling unsatisfied and dirty rather than performatively virtuous. Yet real conversations can yield real results, while all the sad pantomimes of land acknowledgments achieve nothing.

Finally, I would like us all to entertain the scenario that tomorrow, we are invaded and all but annihilated by an alien species. Imagine if, years later, before sitting down to a banquet of Mars Bars and Venus Fly Traps, one of the aliens stands up and solemnly reads (with only a few mispronunciations), “The land on which we stand is Amherst land, with the Hadlians to the west, the Belchertonians to the east, and the Springfielders to the south.” Then, after a polite moment of silence, the aliens sit down and begin their meal, satisfied in the knowledge that they have done the right thing. ■

— Anonymous