Beyond acknowledgment
A little cloud of ash swirls around my feet as I come to an abrupt stop in the middle of a deserted courtyard on the University of Oregon campus. It’s 2:00 p.m. on a late summer day in 2020, and it’s dark outside. More than half a million acres of forest are burning in Oregon and a thick filter of smoke turns the world to shades of orange.
I’m stopped by the shock of recognition. While wandering the deserted campus of the graduate school I’ve just started at, I see a set of white vinyl words on the side of a glass building facade.
“Wili H’ow’tuk,” the words say. The memory of my grandmother’s voice fills my head. It’s a greeting in Takelma, the native language of my tribe. She used to say it when she answered the phone, with a kind of enthusiastic pride for the lift and tilt of the words that didn’t care if an understanding tribal member or confused stranger was on the other end of the line.
The federal government recognizes us as the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, but our name for ourselves is Nahonkuatohna. It means “people” in Takelma, a language dormant for generations that my grandmother worked until her death to revive. Seeing the white vinyl words that I thought no one else cared to know, meant something to me.
They pulled a part of my family history and present reality and put it on the side of a shiny academic institution. And that felt important.
There are 574 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States. They are the survivors of our country’s legacy of cultural destruction, displacement and erasure. Each tribal nation has a historical relationship to and contemporary reality on the land that’s now called the United States.
The open theft of Indigenous land is rarely acknowledged in our country, and our continued presence on that land is even more rarely acknowledged. But that’s beginning to change. And acknowledging the history of Indigenous people in North America — as a phrase on the side of an academic institution, or as a formal statement of acknowledgment — has implications for both the institutions that do them and the individuals that hear and see them.
A HISTORY OF WRONGDOING
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published a report admitting to a history of wrongdoing to Indigenous people in Canada. In response, Toronto public school students read an Indigenous land acknowledgment before standing up to sing, “O Canada.” A month later, the Winnipeg Jets, a National Hockey League team, started a match with a recognition of the original territories they played on.
In my part of the continent, Eugene City Mayor Lucy Vinis started a 2020 speech by acknowledging that the council sat on traditional lands of the Kalapuya people. The same year, The Blackhawks, an NHL team from Chicago, announced that they would open home games with a land acknowledgment.
Kirby Brown, a professor and director of the Native American Studies program at UO, said that at its best, an Indigenous land acknowledgment recognizes the history, contemporary reality and ongoing relationship that Indigenous people have to a particular place.
“Indigenous people are often absent from public discussions and histories of place in the United States,” Brown said. “And this erasure prevents people from acknowledging not just Indigenous history, but contemporary presence and reality.”
Elena Chin, a supervisor at a wilderness education school in Wyoming, started pushing her program to formally acknowledge Indigenous land in 2017. “A land acknowledgment can start a conversation about Indigenous people in places where people don’t know anything at all,” Chin said.
The National Outdoor Leadership School, where she works, hosts thousands of predominantly white students every year on field courses on Indigenous lands in the West. For many of her students, she said, a land acknowledgment at the beginning of a course is the first conversation about the erasure and contemporary reality of Indigenous people that they have ever had.
But according to Brown, a land acknowledgment is a bare minimum first step. And after the sweeping racial injustice conversations that defined the latter half of 2020 pushed corporate America to take a stance on social justice, it’s hard to tell when a land acknowledgment is that first step — or a performance.
When the organizers of the DisOrient Film Festival asked Brown to do a land acknowledgment, he offered them guidance instead.
“It’s more impactful to take the responsibility on and do it yourself, rather than putting that labor and responsibility on Indigenous people to deliver this kind of endorsement,” Brown said. “Though this isn’t how the DisOrient folks were approaching the issue, acknowledgements can risk being reduced to a performance of being multicultural or politically woke, which is problematic.”
Chin had a phrase for when organizations do land acknowledgments and nothing else: performative allyship. Sometimes called virtue signaling, or optical allyship, it’s when an organization or individual feigns righteousness. They adopt the signals of change, but not the actions.
“Don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America,” a Nike advertisement said in support of Black Lives Matter in May. All of Nike’s leadership team is white.
Research says humans seek signals to align themselves with groups and ideas. And there’s an argument that if a signal is being repeated inauthentically, it’s still reaching new people. If more people take the first step, perhaps more people will take the ones after that.
The white vinyl words I read in my grandmother’s voice were on the side of Kalapuya Ilihi, a UO residence hall named after the Indigenous land it sits on. It hosts the Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Residential Community designed to keep Indigenous students at UO.
Kalapuya Ilihi wasn’t built because of a land acknowledgment, Brown said. It was built after years of work on the part of Indigenous students and staff.
“But the practice can have an effect in getting institutions to rethink their relationships to history and to tribal nations,” Brown said.
BEYOND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
On March 8 at 6:32 PM, a green webcam indicator light blipped on Julia Trachsel’s laptop as she signed into her Zoom account. The faces of her Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sisters popped into existence in gallery view on her screen. When everyone was there, she started the chapter meeting.
“The University of Oregon and the City of Eugene are located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional Indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people,” Trachsel said into her webcam. She’s an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and brought up the idea of starting chapter meetings with a land acknowledgment in February.
“I think that they’re important because our education system really pushes the colonialism, attempted genocide, and everything that has to do with the mistreatment of Native people, under the rug,” Trachsel said.
On March 8 she followed her land acknowledgment with a discussion on the matriarchal structure typical of many Indigenous societies for Women’s History Month.
“It sparked a lot of curiosity,” Trachsel said. “Since it’s over Zoom, I’ve seen a lot of people who will go to their hometown, research the land, and learn about the tribe. They’re learning about the places they live that aren’t theirs. Which languages were spoken there and which treaties were broken.”
In 1856, hundreds of Indigenous people in Southern Oregon were murdered by white settlers and the U.S. Army. The ones that escaped death or a forced march to faroff reservations became my ancestors. Small towns in Southern Oregon celebrate their hardy frontier ancestors, but not the genocide they committed.
In 2020, a permit request to hold a death ceremony for my grandmother on our traditional powwow grounds near South Umpqua Falls was denied by the United States Forest Service. The powwow grounds, an important summer gathering spot for Upper Umpqua people and layered with thousands of years of our history, is now a campground managed by the Umpqua National Forest.
Those thousands of years of history, and decades of hosting the South Umpqua Powwow, didn’t change the fact that a new office employee couldn’t find the file folder of our past permits. And until they found the past permits, we couldn’t legally hold a ceremony — because we needed to prove a precedent for gathering on the land.
Performative or not, Indigenous land acknowledgments recognize precedent. They normalize discussion of a history North Americans are taught to forget. That’s an important first step, and if they can encourage change in an undergraduate sorority on the campus of a university acknowledging that it is built on Indigenous land, maybe there’s hope for institutions like the USFS.
“It’s good for them to put a face to it,” Trachsel said. “I’m right here. You are on my land and you need to acknowledge it.”