‘Indigenous Land Acknowledgments’ Could Have Unintended Effects

Redwoods along the Little Sur River in Big Sur on the coast of California. A Native American tribe has reclaimed a small part of ancestral lands on California’s Big Sur coast that were lost to Spanish colonial settlement nearly 250 years ago. Doug Steakley/Western Rivers Conservancy via AP

Commentary

There is a strange sort of ritual that has arisen and become popular over the past few years in some parts of the United States and Canada. If you attend a city council meeting, board of supervisor’s meeting, or even some school board meetings today in California (and probably in some other states), you may hear at the beginning a recitation of a “land acknowledgment” by one or all of the board members.