Every since I heard you liken land acknowledgments to a 'liberal's version of thoughts and prayers' a few years ago my perspective on them shifted. (and continues to shift) I appreciate you sharing so much on the subject--in my next book I put in a LA, then took it out, put it back, lamented how it felt like virtue signaling, took it out again, added a bunch of action items and an acknowledgement that a LA is but one tiny step toward actual necessary change, felt okay about it for five minutes, took it out again, and so on. It ended up being included. I'm still unsure about how I feel about it.
I'm curious why you feel a book needs a land acknowledgement? I wonder where the pressure for land acknowledgements in any context are coming from, frankly.
I struggle to articulate this for some reason but I see it as an impulse to goodness without reflection. Like, we're all so speedy all the time and there is immense pressure to Be a Good Person and being on the Internet feels like being yelled at constantly to Get It Right and Be Up On The Latest Woke Thing. Like when people started posting black squares and because everyone was doing it more people kept doing it even while Black Lives Matter organizers were telling people to stop.
I have to be so intentional to pause when I feel the impulse in myself and consider if I'm doing a thing because my ego says I should to prove something, or if I have actually engaged with it and am doing it from a place of deep consideration. It's challenging because social media in particular is of course designed to bypass impulse control.
I think it came from the fact that the book's all about one's relationship with the earth/land so in one sense it felt like it was the elephant in the room that had to be named. And I noticed that Milkweed had included one in a book i was reading at the time, so I took example from that since I respect them as a publishing house who makes generally sound decisions. I'm sure part of it comes from all the stuff I'm still (and will always be) unpacking and the deep desire to do the right thing, like KSC Hatch mentioned.
Though I will say it took probably the longest to write than any other part...like 10 months or something of reflecting, mulling, researching, rewriting--so I feel like it came from a place of deep consideration, but then again, the ego is a tricky one sometimes. If any of you end up having a look at the book when it's out, I'll be curious (and quite nervous, truly) to hear your thoughts.
I wrote a creative non-fiction piece about my own complicated feels about land acknowledgements (https://kschatch.substack.com/p/how-to-decolonize-your-mind) and the difference between a virtual signalling one and one that is a deep an abiding practice. It helps for sure, to have this kind of check in with self about when to do a land acknowledgement and when to refrain and why context and intention matter.
One thing I meant to put in this newsletter and forgot to considers a person whose newsletter I follow was raving about this house she bought, which is great. Then she went on to do some BS land acknowledgement related to it. It annoyed me and I unsubscribed. I don't get it.
I read one book this year where the person worked in the phrase in a way I haven’t seen before. Instead of having land acknowledgements in the essays, she had a chapter titled Land Acknowledgment. And then she didn’t write one; instead, she wrote a chapter of Native history, before and after colonialism, related to the lands she was writing about. I wrote her afterward because I was curious how she decided to do that. I can’t remember what her answer was but it was some version of trying harder and with more honesty.
Interesting. I often feel like I am being told I have no right to write about connection to nature because how dare I, the child of many generations of white colonists (who were almost all farmers with some connection to land and anyway, poor and desperate mostly). It's my people that have destroyed the land and if I can't point to some native heritage can I really write about it? I don't often write about my senses and communication with what's around me because am I allowed? Does my being-ness grant me this right or is it my DNA? And yet don't we need to help people feel more connected and not tell them this is one more way and place in which they do not belong? Because if I belong and I am connected and I love the place I am living aren't I going to work harder to be a good caretaker for it? It's on my mind a lot. And I'm always afraid to say this because I will offend someone and of course I come from a place of privilege. But some days I understand some of why people on the right detest the left so much.
I’m not sure how to fully address that. My maternal grandmother’s family has been on this continent since the 1600s, while my father immigrated here from Russia as an adult. The most direct connection I feel with these issues is with my maternal grandfather’s parents and grandparents, who emigrated from Denmark-ruled Prussia in the mid-1800s and homesteaded in Montana, especially since my second cousins still ranch that same land. I feel relationship but also responsibility about that place, and the place I live, and the violent realities that led to me living here and loving these lands. What do both the relationship and responsibility look like? It’s what I spend my life trying to answer.
I generally don’t find the left/right dichotomy at all helpful. But most of the discourse on that is something I see repeated in national media that has little understanding of rural areas like mine, little knowledge of what it’s like to be in a place where elected officials openly espouse anti-government extremism and Christian nationalism and have spoken openly and recently about killing liberals. It’s not pretty. When I see left/right discussed in U.S. national media outlets, it’s like they’re talking about another planet. It lacks the kinds of granular and nuanced understanding to apply well to most communities.
Love for nature is part of being alive. It doesn’t seem like a bad place to start!
Yeah. I have to keep being with this for a while. And certainly it isn't up to Chris or anyone else to help me with it. And wow, I never imagined where you live being that extreme!
This is the crux of it. I spend time cultivating a personal relationship to the land. It's deeply personal and for me has been about understanding myself as part of nature, rather than apart from nature, which is a true fact about all humans. The romantazicing of any Indigenous nation as being somehow more "inherently" close to the land misses the mark that all humans are indigenous to somewhere and ultimately all indigenous to the planet.
I trust in my practice because I reflect on it and can very clearly explain how my view of the land has changed over time. Which is to say, only you can know what your relationship is to the land, and as a human being you have one. The question isn't "Do white people get to talk about a connection to nature?" The question is "What is your personal work to do to be present with our interrelationship to nature?"
Of the two witnesses, trust the principal one.
One of the greatest skills I've learned to cultivate (only recently) is to ignore people who seem to think they know what my work in the world is. It works both ways, because I have also stopped feeling the need to tell other people what their work is, which is a thankless thing that drains energy and gets no one anywhere fast. :P
A good thing about 67 is it's easier and easier to be publicly disagreeable. And not even be taken offensively, because you're 67, and basically invisible.
Anyway, I'm not silent when people say things like, " Oh you teach in a prison. That's so nice of you." Bleh. Like education isn't for everyone.
Archaeologists have a lot to answer for, but one good practice I saw encouraged back when I was still actively doing it is to stop collecting stone tools unless you've got a real scientific reason for it. And when arrowheads or awls or other tools made by remote people of the past are lying on the surface, there's rarely scientific value in removing them. Encourage people to leave them where they lie to give witness to the next traveler. If you wouldn't remove a stone on your visit to Salisbury Cathedral, don't remove the signs that others were there before you on the landscape.
That whole "there's no history in North America..." is sometimes ignorant, sometimes intentional erasure (dismantling the pyramid-like mounds in St. Louis, for instance), but never true. Corn didn't domesticate itself after all. Learning what people did on the land before you is part of understanding your literal and figurative place in the world.
Came across my Mastodon feed that Joanna Macy, at 95, is recovering from pneumonia and her friends were asking for thoughts and prayers? good vibes? whatever it is we do when we send out our wishes for healing -- feels like you somehow tapped into that energy out there.
That image of the buffalo made my knees buckle a little: love at first sight. I closed my eyes and imagined standing in all that beautiful quiet, breathing in forever through the soles of my feet. 🙏🏽
We are in the midst of a “snow anomaly” here in southcentral Alaska, and I find myself just wanting to “be” in deep peace and joy. That being said, I turn to your posts for my dose of pensive thought and beauty. Thank you for all that, and more, Chris, to include some great information on Bitterroot. The images feed my quieting spirit, and I thank you for this.
The bitterroot is gorgeous. I did not know that it was a flower. Thank you for the education.
Continue to sharpen awareness of the realities that surround us. Some people just do not think before they talk. Sometimes, people who are otherwise quite intelligent. Chris, just keep writing and speaking the truth in the beautiful way that you do.❤️
Oh my. I remember when I thought Canadian history was incredibly dull because what I was spoonfed in school was the blandest form of propaganda: "Unlike the US, we didn't enslave people!" "In Canada, the British and the Natives worked together to build strong trade routes across this great land!" "Canada is a perfect mosaic of cultures living in harmony!"
I was disabused of this notion by a teacher in high school during the unit when we were learning about South Africa's apartheid. He simply asked us if Canada had an apartheid system and when we nodded solemnly and said obviously the Japanese internment camps were that and he just said, "And what about the reservation system?"
It was mind opening and I'm grateful to him for being one of the few teachers I had to encourage critical thinking and asking questions rather than memorizing the whitewashed "facts" of our textbooks.
“It’s all out there and it takes a mere tug on a single thread and everything unfurls. Everything. All the terrible. To choose not to do this betrays a staggering degree of entitlement and privilege.” And that’s a choice. No matter how insulated each of us might be in media and social bubbles, it’s impossible to ignore every bit of this and all it means without some level of intention.
I was passing one of those highway signs recently, the “Veterans Bridge Memorial Highway” kind of thing, and was thinking that a land acknowledgment feels similar. A highway sign does nothing to address damage done to veterans or anyone else, or even damage caused by the highway itself. Like telling someone you’ve injured, “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt,” never claiming any responsibility. What, really, is the point of acknowledgment without addressing the harm?
Here for the healing and praising too. LA’s have been a trigger for me for awhile; I don’t like the policing of behavior which is how it sometimes feels by other people - “Show us your woke card! Okay, it’s there, now we can go back to other grandstanding...” I dunno. I certainly don’t have answers but for me, I have to be in thoughtful conversation with myself about how to make change, and a LA just feels to me like a great way to look like we know what the hell is going on without having actual solutions. It’s also a way for corporations and institutions to wear sheep’s clothing while still accomplishing all the slaughtering. I feel nervous even saying this out loud because in many cases I feel like individuals using them genuinely want to be effecting change. It’s like confronting a racist uncle for them? Feels necessary to at least acknowledge the sins of our country, a tiny first step in the long road of awakening?? I DON'T KNOW. I do like this thought, that it’s a country’s way of trying to wake up to native beauty and culture and trying to reconnect. But it’s . . . flawed, and full of peril. And lol trigger warning. I mean, I know you’re actually triggered but I smiled at your play on the subject.
I feel what you're saying about grandstanding, it does seem that way too often, but I think combining an LA with action is what's needed. I was at a dedication ceremony to a new Nature Conservancy property in NH last year & the organizers did do a land acknowledgment BUT they also invited representatives of local northeastern tribes (which too many people think either don't still exist or have moved far away) to take a large part in the dedication and the discussion of what the land preservation and restoration means. It seemed like a real effort at reconciliation and inclusion in the decision-making processes, which is too often the missing piece: empowerment.
I love this and whole-heartedly agree. And hear both of you saying what sounds like a genuine solution: come with all the angles. Multiplicity of creativity and movement, and include primary players. I also think what you’re talking about is ceremony, which when undertaken with sanctity and openness is infinitely healing in ways we cannot measure or even sometimes understand. Thank you for adding this. Really appreciate it.
Thank you. I have thought about these same ideas so much lately and you have such an impeccable way of wording them. I too was stuck in a quiet rage recently while my racist white brother in law spewed off anti-indigenous ideals. How people can be well into adulthood and still not challenge what they were taught as children astounds me but I believe it’s because it is uncomfortable. The mere idea that they could be wrong, be aligned with the villain of the story of our erasure, is too much for them to process.
The flowers are gorgeous and I will never tire of seeing your photos and the buffalo. Truly stunning. I would seethe overhearing that conversation too--so tired of such inculcated colonial ideas of what constitutes history and culture, and of shallow statements that virtue signal rather than actually reflect any real knowledge about the actual history of the places on which we live in this country, or any real substantive reparation. "It’s the so-called “honoring” without action that comprises the gaslighting; it is a euphemism for taking without giving back that has been the story on this continent since colonizers first arrived here." YES. It is gaslighting and bullshit, just like so much of this society's performative platitudes--a culture of polemics without action, without awareness, but full of self-soothing and playing to ego. I loved how Reservation Dogs parodied the well-intentioned ideas of LAs, it was perfection. Yours in solidarity and with anger and also in hope, in aspiring stubbornly still to joy. 💜
I need to get back to Reservation Dogs. I only watched two episodes so far of the most recent season and wasn't really into them but I know if I dedicate myself I'll feel differently. The same thing kinda happened with the first season too. I am a terrible television watcher.
the first two episodes didn't totally win me over but moving on from there the whole season is really really good, and the last episode...oof. Beautiful and all the feels. I bet you'd like it, terrible television watcher. ;)
“It’s all out there and it takes a mere tug on a single thread and everything unfurls.”
Beautiful, and very true, though in my experience you sometimes have to be committed to finding it.
I used to be appallingly condescending about North American history. Having lived most of my life with medieval castles, stone circles and neolithic tombs less than an hour's drive away (#YmweldCymru #VisitWales), it was hard not to smirk whenever I saw "Historic Downtown" plaques on buildings built less than a century earlier. And the tendency of many to act as if history began in 1776 didn't exactly help. (Still doesn't, but for different reasons.)
Visiting (and subsequently moving to) Butte changed all that. There's so much packed into the city's 150 years, an incredibly rich chronicle of working class immigrant history, industrial unrest, unionism, Irish nationalists, Finnish socialists, Jewish anarchists - this isn't the American West I was taught about in school. It was a revelation.
It took a couple of years before I started to sense there was something missing from this narrative. Who was here before those immigrants? And what happened to them? Questions so obvious as to seem banal. But I wasn't prepared for how hard it would be to find the answers. Apart from fleeting references to common hunting grounds, and the "Crees living near the city dump" there was almost nothing "out there", or at least that's how it seemed. A few academic papers provided some pointers (thank you Nicholas Vrooman and Elizabeth Sperry) but other than that I was shocked at the lack of information, and perhaps even more at the lack of interest. I'd heard people talk about the erasure of indigenous history, but this was when I really began to understand what they were talking about.
Sure I don’t need to go into the Oregon Treaty and Louis Riel and the Cree Deportation Act here; but one thing that repeatedly strikes me is how people react when I try talking about these subjects. Eyes are rolled, shoulders are shrugged, the subject is changed. With very few exceptions, people just don’t want to know. My (evolving) theory is that it’s too personal. It’s neither long ago nor far away, and in a place as proud and close-knit as Butte, it’s hard to confront this sometimes eye-wateringly racist aspect of the city’s history. That’s grandpa you’re talking about. And it's perpetuated in the way the city's history is taught and celebrated to this day. Indians? What Indians?
“There are more books about the culinary habits of Irish miners in Butte than publications on the native cultures that once roamed across Montana and still live on its reservations.”
Carl M. Davis, author of “Six Hundred Generations: An Archaeological History of Montana”.
That Davis quote is excellent, and so true. Thank you, Colin. I think this, that you say about Butte:
"There's so much packed into the city's 150 years, an incredibly rich chronicle of working class immigrant history, industrial unrest, unionism, Irish nationalists, Finnish socialists, Jewish anarchists - this isn't the American West I was taught about in school. It was a revelation."
... is one of those threads that I think can be pulled on to totally reorganize a person's propagandized thinking, if they let it. At the root, I'm more interested in the class struggle even than the Indigenous one, as that is the thing that could unite so many of us, and SHOULD, and something I'm considering shifting more of my focus to. I don't know. Regardless, I appreciate your thoughts.
LA statements are patronizing at its worst. Similar statements started appearing when Black Lives Matter activism took off, mentioning how an organization "honored" the necessity of diversity. Women get it all the time: "Don't worry your pretty head. . ." People in wheelchairs also get it: "You are sooooo brave!"
None of us are children, and none of us should accept being subjected to other people's "guilt" about privilege. I had no choice to be born where I was or to whom, but I do have a choice to help wherever I can and not add to other people's misery.
Shout out to Erin O'Regan White, who rules for so many reasons, including photographic ones! It was a neat surprise to open this one up and see both your words (always a gift) and her photos.
Every since I heard you liken land acknowledgments to a 'liberal's version of thoughts and prayers' a few years ago my perspective on them shifted. (and continues to shift) I appreciate you sharing so much on the subject--in my next book I put in a LA, then took it out, put it back, lamented how it felt like virtue signaling, took it out again, added a bunch of action items and an acknowledgement that a LA is but one tiny step toward actual necessary change, felt okay about it for five minutes, took it out again, and so on. It ended up being included. I'm still unsure about how I feel about it.
I'm curious why you feel a book needs a land acknowledgement? I wonder where the pressure for land acknowledgements in any context are coming from, frankly.
I struggle to articulate this for some reason but I see it as an impulse to goodness without reflection. Like, we're all so speedy all the time and there is immense pressure to Be a Good Person and being on the Internet feels like being yelled at constantly to Get It Right and Be Up On The Latest Woke Thing. Like when people started posting black squares and because everyone was doing it more people kept doing it even while Black Lives Matter organizers were telling people to stop.
I have to be so intentional to pause when I feel the impulse in myself and consider if I'm doing a thing because my ego says I should to prove something, or if I have actually engaged with it and am doing it from a place of deep consideration. It's challenging because social media in particular is of course designed to bypass impulse control.
I think it came from the fact that the book's all about one's relationship with the earth/land so in one sense it felt like it was the elephant in the room that had to be named. And I noticed that Milkweed had included one in a book i was reading at the time, so I took example from that since I respect them as a publishing house who makes generally sound decisions. I'm sure part of it comes from all the stuff I'm still (and will always be) unpacking and the deep desire to do the right thing, like KSC Hatch mentioned.
Though I will say it took probably the longest to write than any other part...like 10 months or something of reflecting, mulling, researching, rewriting--so I feel like it came from a place of deep consideration, but then again, the ego is a tricky one sometimes. If any of you end up having a look at the book when it's out, I'll be curious (and quite nervous, truly) to hear your thoughts.
I wrote a creative non-fiction piece about my own complicated feels about land acknowledgements (https://kschatch.substack.com/p/how-to-decolonize-your-mind) and the difference between a virtual signalling one and one that is a deep an abiding practice. It helps for sure, to have this kind of check in with self about when to do a land acknowledgement and when to refrain and why context and intention matter.
One thing I meant to put in this newsletter and forgot to considers a person whose newsletter I follow was raving about this house she bought, which is great. Then she went on to do some BS land acknowledgement related to it. It annoyed me and I unsubscribed. I don't get it.
virtue signaling - that's the word I needed!
I read one book this year where the person worked in the phrase in a way I haven’t seen before. Instead of having land acknowledgements in the essays, she had a chapter titled Land Acknowledgment. And then she didn’t write one; instead, she wrote a chapter of Native history, before and after colonialism, related to the lands she was writing about. I wrote her afterward because I was curious how she decided to do that. I can’t remember what her answer was but it was some version of trying harder and with more honesty.
Interesting. I often feel like I am being told I have no right to write about connection to nature because how dare I, the child of many generations of white colonists (who were almost all farmers with some connection to land and anyway, poor and desperate mostly). It's my people that have destroyed the land and if I can't point to some native heritage can I really write about it? I don't often write about my senses and communication with what's around me because am I allowed? Does my being-ness grant me this right or is it my DNA? And yet don't we need to help people feel more connected and not tell them this is one more way and place in which they do not belong? Because if I belong and I am connected and I love the place I am living aren't I going to work harder to be a good caretaker for it? It's on my mind a lot. And I'm always afraid to say this because I will offend someone and of course I come from a place of privilege. But some days I understand some of why people on the right detest the left so much.
I’m not sure how to fully address that. My maternal grandmother’s family has been on this continent since the 1600s, while my father immigrated here from Russia as an adult. The most direct connection I feel with these issues is with my maternal grandfather’s parents and grandparents, who emigrated from Denmark-ruled Prussia in the mid-1800s and homesteaded in Montana, especially since my second cousins still ranch that same land. I feel relationship but also responsibility about that place, and the place I live, and the violent realities that led to me living here and loving these lands. What do both the relationship and responsibility look like? It’s what I spend my life trying to answer.
I generally don’t find the left/right dichotomy at all helpful. But most of the discourse on that is something I see repeated in national media that has little understanding of rural areas like mine, little knowledge of what it’s like to be in a place where elected officials openly espouse anti-government extremism and Christian nationalism and have spoken openly and recently about killing liberals. It’s not pretty. When I see left/right discussed in U.S. national media outlets, it’s like they’re talking about another planet. It lacks the kinds of granular and nuanced understanding to apply well to most communities.
Love for nature is part of being alive. It doesn’t seem like a bad place to start!
"What do both the relationship and responsibility look like?"
This is SUCH a powerful question. Love it.
💛💚💙
Yeah. I have to keep being with this for a while. And certainly it isn't up to Chris or anyone else to help me with it. And wow, I never imagined where you live being that extreme!
🧡
My town leans progressive but the county is far more populous and conservative, although it’s hard to even justify calling it that.
This is the crux of it. I spend time cultivating a personal relationship to the land. It's deeply personal and for me has been about understanding myself as part of nature, rather than apart from nature, which is a true fact about all humans. The romantazicing of any Indigenous nation as being somehow more "inherently" close to the land misses the mark that all humans are indigenous to somewhere and ultimately all indigenous to the planet.
I trust in my practice because I reflect on it and can very clearly explain how my view of the land has changed over time. Which is to say, only you can know what your relationship is to the land, and as a human being you have one. The question isn't "Do white people get to talk about a connection to nature?" The question is "What is your personal work to do to be present with our interrelationship to nature?"
Of the two witnesses, trust the principal one.
One of the greatest skills I've learned to cultivate (only recently) is to ignore people who seem to think they know what my work in the world is. It works both ways, because I have also stopped feeling the need to tell other people what their work is, which is a thankless thing that drains energy and gets no one anywhere fast. :P
Was this Lucy Bryan's In Between Places? I know she's got a chapter in there titled Land Acknowledgements
Yes! That was it.
ha! I thought so. we share a publisher :) I thought that was an interesating approach as well.
A good thing about 67 is it's easier and easier to be publicly disagreeable. And not even be taken offensively, because you're 67, and basically invisible.
Anyway, I'm not silent when people say things like, " Oh you teach in a prison. That's so nice of you." Bleh. Like education isn't for everyone.
Look forward to 67.
I have my share of publicly disagreeable moments. They just most often happen to be from a stage or lectern in front of people.... 😂
Writer poet teacher style. 💜
Archaeologists have a lot to answer for, but one good practice I saw encouraged back when I was still actively doing it is to stop collecting stone tools unless you've got a real scientific reason for it. And when arrowheads or awls or other tools made by remote people of the past are lying on the surface, there's rarely scientific value in removing them. Encourage people to leave them where they lie to give witness to the next traveler. If you wouldn't remove a stone on your visit to Salisbury Cathedral, don't remove the signs that others were there before you on the landscape.
That whole "there's no history in North America..." is sometimes ignorant, sometimes intentional erasure (dismantling the pyramid-like mounds in St. Louis, for instance), but never true. Corn didn't domesticate itself after all. Learning what people did on the land before you is part of understanding your literal and figurative place in the world.
Came across my Mastodon feed that Joanna Macy, at 95, is recovering from pneumonia and her friends were asking for thoughts and prayers? good vibes? whatever it is we do when we send out our wishes for healing -- feels like you somehow tapped into that energy out there.
Wow, I did not know that. Thank you.
That image of the buffalo made my knees buckle a little: love at first sight. I closed my eyes and imagined standing in all that beautiful quiet, breathing in forever through the soles of my feet. 🙏🏽
We are in the midst of a “snow anomaly” here in southcentral Alaska, and I find myself just wanting to “be” in deep peace and joy. That being said, I turn to your posts for my dose of pensive thought and beauty. Thank you for all that, and more, Chris, to include some great information on Bitterroot. The images feed my quieting spirit, and I thank you for this.
"Snow anomaly" sounds great.
Hi Chris!
Beautiful words from Joanna Macy. Thank you.
The bitterroot is gorgeous. I did not know that it was a flower. Thank you for the education.
Continue to sharpen awareness of the realities that surround us. Some people just do not think before they talk. Sometimes, people who are otherwise quite intelligent. Chris, just keep writing and speaking the truth in the beautiful way that you do.❤️
Sincerely,
Melissa
Thank you, Melissa. Erin takes tons of great flower photos.
Oh my. I remember when I thought Canadian history was incredibly dull because what I was spoonfed in school was the blandest form of propaganda: "Unlike the US, we didn't enslave people!" "In Canada, the British and the Natives worked together to build strong trade routes across this great land!" "Canada is a perfect mosaic of cultures living in harmony!"
I was disabused of this notion by a teacher in high school during the unit when we were learning about South Africa's apartheid. He simply asked us if Canada had an apartheid system and when we nodded solemnly and said obviously the Japanese internment camps were that and he just said, "And what about the reservation system?"
It was mind opening and I'm grateful to him for being one of the few teachers I had to encourage critical thinking and asking questions rather than memorizing the whitewashed "facts" of our textbooks.
That bison photo is from the Bison Range, right? I'm about very nearly almost certainly positive maybe that I'm right.
It's a 'beaut' and a keeper, which by the way, I did. Added it to my pilfered collection of all the other bison images you posted. Thanks
It is the Bison Range, yes. And pilfer all you like!
“It’s all out there and it takes a mere tug on a single thread and everything unfurls. Everything. All the terrible. To choose not to do this betrays a staggering degree of entitlement and privilege.” And that’s a choice. No matter how insulated each of us might be in media and social bubbles, it’s impossible to ignore every bit of this and all it means without some level of intention.
I was passing one of those highway signs recently, the “Veterans Bridge Memorial Highway” kind of thing, and was thinking that a land acknowledgment feels similar. A highway sign does nothing to address damage done to veterans or anyone else, or even damage caused by the highway itself. Like telling someone you’ve injured, “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt,” never claiming any responsibility. What, really, is the point of acknowledgment without addressing the harm?
"Like telling someone you’ve injured, 'I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt,' never claiming any responsibility."
Ugh. So true.
Here for the healing and praising too. LA’s have been a trigger for me for awhile; I don’t like the policing of behavior which is how it sometimes feels by other people - “Show us your woke card! Okay, it’s there, now we can go back to other grandstanding...” I dunno. I certainly don’t have answers but for me, I have to be in thoughtful conversation with myself about how to make change, and a LA just feels to me like a great way to look like we know what the hell is going on without having actual solutions. It’s also a way for corporations and institutions to wear sheep’s clothing while still accomplishing all the slaughtering. I feel nervous even saying this out loud because in many cases I feel like individuals using them genuinely want to be effecting change. It’s like confronting a racist uncle for them? Feels necessary to at least acknowledge the sins of our country, a tiny first step in the long road of awakening?? I DON'T KNOW. I do like this thought, that it’s a country’s way of trying to wake up to native beauty and culture and trying to reconnect. But it’s . . . flawed, and full of peril. And lol trigger warning. I mean, I know you’re actually triggered but I smiled at your play on the subject.
I feel what you're saying about grandstanding, it does seem that way too often, but I think combining an LA with action is what's needed. I was at a dedication ceremony to a new Nature Conservancy property in NH last year & the organizers did do a land acknowledgment BUT they also invited representatives of local northeastern tribes (which too many people think either don't still exist or have moved far away) to take a large part in the dedication and the discussion of what the land preservation and restoration means. It seemed like a real effort at reconciliation and inclusion in the decision-making processes, which is too often the missing piece: empowerment.
I love this and whole-heartedly agree. And hear both of you saying what sounds like a genuine solution: come with all the angles. Multiplicity of creativity and movement, and include primary players. I also think what you’re talking about is ceremony, which when undertaken with sanctity and openness is infinitely healing in ways we cannot measure or even sometimes understand. Thank you for adding this. Really appreciate it.
Thank you. I have thought about these same ideas so much lately and you have such an impeccable way of wording them. I too was stuck in a quiet rage recently while my racist white brother in law spewed off anti-indigenous ideals. How people can be well into adulthood and still not challenge what they were taught as children astounds me but I believe it’s because it is uncomfortable. The mere idea that they could be wrong, be aligned with the villain of the story of our erasure, is too much for them to process.
Miigwech,
Tess
💚
The flowers are gorgeous and I will never tire of seeing your photos and the buffalo. Truly stunning. I would seethe overhearing that conversation too--so tired of such inculcated colonial ideas of what constitutes history and culture, and of shallow statements that virtue signal rather than actually reflect any real knowledge about the actual history of the places on which we live in this country, or any real substantive reparation. "It’s the so-called “honoring” without action that comprises the gaslighting; it is a euphemism for taking without giving back that has been the story on this continent since colonizers first arrived here." YES. It is gaslighting and bullshit, just like so much of this society's performative platitudes--a culture of polemics without action, without awareness, but full of self-soothing and playing to ego. I loved how Reservation Dogs parodied the well-intentioned ideas of LAs, it was perfection. Yours in solidarity and with anger and also in hope, in aspiring stubbornly still to joy. 💜
❤️🦬❤️
I need to get back to Reservation Dogs. I only watched two episodes so far of the most recent season and wasn't really into them but I know if I dedicate myself I'll feel differently. The same thing kinda happened with the first season too. I am a terrible television watcher.
the first two episodes didn't totally win me over but moving on from there the whole season is really really good, and the last episode...oof. Beautiful and all the feels. I bet you'd like it, terrible television watcher. ;)
“It’s all out there and it takes a mere tug on a single thread and everything unfurls.”
Beautiful, and very true, though in my experience you sometimes have to be committed to finding it.
I used to be appallingly condescending about North American history. Having lived most of my life with medieval castles, stone circles and neolithic tombs less than an hour's drive away (#YmweldCymru #VisitWales), it was hard not to smirk whenever I saw "Historic Downtown" plaques on buildings built less than a century earlier. And the tendency of many to act as if history began in 1776 didn't exactly help. (Still doesn't, but for different reasons.)
Visiting (and subsequently moving to) Butte changed all that. There's so much packed into the city's 150 years, an incredibly rich chronicle of working class immigrant history, industrial unrest, unionism, Irish nationalists, Finnish socialists, Jewish anarchists - this isn't the American West I was taught about in school. It was a revelation.
It took a couple of years before I started to sense there was something missing from this narrative. Who was here before those immigrants? And what happened to them? Questions so obvious as to seem banal. But I wasn't prepared for how hard it would be to find the answers. Apart from fleeting references to common hunting grounds, and the "Crees living near the city dump" there was almost nothing "out there", or at least that's how it seemed. A few academic papers provided some pointers (thank you Nicholas Vrooman and Elizabeth Sperry) but other than that I was shocked at the lack of information, and perhaps even more at the lack of interest. I'd heard people talk about the erasure of indigenous history, but this was when I really began to understand what they were talking about.
Sure I don’t need to go into the Oregon Treaty and Louis Riel and the Cree Deportation Act here; but one thing that repeatedly strikes me is how people react when I try talking about these subjects. Eyes are rolled, shoulders are shrugged, the subject is changed. With very few exceptions, people just don’t want to know. My (evolving) theory is that it’s too personal. It’s neither long ago nor far away, and in a place as proud and close-knit as Butte, it’s hard to confront this sometimes eye-wateringly racist aspect of the city’s history. That’s grandpa you’re talking about. And it's perpetuated in the way the city's history is taught and celebrated to this day. Indians? What Indians?
“There are more books about the culinary habits of Irish miners in Butte than publications on the native cultures that once roamed across Montana and still live on its reservations.”
Carl M. Davis, author of “Six Hundred Generations: An Archaeological History of Montana”.
That Davis quote is excellent, and so true. Thank you, Colin. I think this, that you say about Butte:
"There's so much packed into the city's 150 years, an incredibly rich chronicle of working class immigrant history, industrial unrest, unionism, Irish nationalists, Finnish socialists, Jewish anarchists - this isn't the American West I was taught about in school. It was a revelation."
... is one of those threads that I think can be pulled on to totally reorganize a person's propagandized thinking, if they let it. At the root, I'm more interested in the class struggle even than the Indigenous one, as that is the thing that could unite so many of us, and SHOULD, and something I'm considering shifting more of my focus to. I don't know. Regardless, I appreciate your thoughts.
LA statements are patronizing at its worst. Similar statements started appearing when Black Lives Matter activism took off, mentioning how an organization "honored" the necessity of diversity. Women get it all the time: "Don't worry your pretty head. . ." People in wheelchairs also get it: "You are sooooo brave!"
None of us are children, and none of us should accept being subjected to other people's "guilt" about privilege. I had no choice to be born where I was or to whom, but I do have a choice to help wherever I can and not add to other people's misery.
Yes, exactly. 🙏🏽
Shout out to Erin O'Regan White, who rules for so many reasons, including photographic ones! It was a neat surprise to open this one up and see both your words (always a gift) and her photos.
She's definitely one of my favorites.