Daniel Lyons' Notes

land acknowledgment

I've always despised land acknowledgment. It is completely disingenuous. If you really cared that land has been taken immorally then you would take steps correct the injustice. Simply acknowledging injustice without doing anything about it isn't really acknowledging much of anything at all.

In 1993, US congress officially recognized that the US government illegally annexed the Kingdom of Hawaii. Fat lot of good that did! To this day, the US government STILL does not recognize the Hawaiian people as the native people of Hawaii, and they still do not have first nation status. The official apology from Congress has virtually no effect on the day to day lives of real native Hawaiians.[1] First nation status would have actual, possibly helpful ramifications on Hawaiian's daily lives.

Land acknowledgment is nothing but useless virtue signaling. Pretending to care. It's worth than not caring. It's taking credit for caring, while not caring at all. Worse yet, when others are taking actual steps to correct injustices, your land acknowledgment actually impedes progress. It gives people the false assurance that they did something meaningful and corrected the injustice. Meanwhile, nothing happened. At all.

Footnotes


  1. Most people don't even know that the US ever made this apology at all!↩︎

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