In Canada these days, many events like graduations, musical or theatrical performances, awards presentations, lectures, and other public functions are prefaced with an official statement acknowledging that the proceedings take place on the unceded ancestral territory of the local Aboriginal group.  As well, some Canadian institutions, such as the Ottawa Public Library, have installed permanent signage expressing a similar point to all staff, clients, or students who enter their buildings.  Like so much else in Canadian policy towards Indigenous people over the past fifty years, the ritual honoring of Native land is a mostly empty gesture which satisfies the demands of the Native legal lobby, flatters the conscience of the non-Native chattering classes, and does more harm than good for ordinary Native citizens.

First of all, having heard my share of territorial testimonies spoken aloud, I can report that they are usually uttered with all the emotional commitment of a preflight safety demonstration:  a perfunctory, dutiful disclaimer before the real experience gets under way.  Surely the long, complicated story of pre- and post-colonial Canada warrants more consideration than a secular version of saying grace or a northern version of pledging allegiance?  Why reduce a powerful, politically charged message to a mechanical observance?

The formal introductions which announce that university commencements, literary readings or academic debates occur on Native land also reinforce unfortunate stereotypes of “primitive” Aboriginals.  It’s one thing to note that a strip mine or a strip mall sits on what used to be the unspoiled preserve of such-and-such a First Nation – anyone can appreciate the tragedy of natural wilderness being lost to ugly industrialization.  But libraries and schools, where the Aboriginal-land reminders are most often invoked, are sites of knowledge and progress, representing the best of the culture which displaced that of the Aboriginals themselves.  It’s ironic that the Ottawa Public Library and Library and Archives Canada’s new joint facility, scheduled for opening in 2025, is to be named Ādisōke, an Algonquin word for storytelling.  That is, a collection of millions of published textual documents, many of historic significance, will be housed in a building whose official designation pays tribute to a culture with no printing presses, archival science, or, indeed, no written language. The unintended implication of raising Indigenous claims and celebrating Indigenous heritage inside grand works of architecture is that Natives merely held the vacant property until outsiders came along and actually built something useful on it.  Natives were good at overseeing a lot of empty space, runs the inference; they can’t possibly be responsible for anything that’s since been done to it.  Is that what the ceremonial declarations are meant to tell us?

In a fascinating 2023 book, Not Stolen:  The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, Jeff Fynn-Paul points out that the sparsely distributed Indigenous populations of what are now Canada and the northern US had necessarily different concepts of property and ownership than the ones that prevailed in England, France, or Spain circa 1500.  For one thing, Native bands had long waged what can only be called genocidal wars with each other over access to wild game.  Since agriculture (including the domestication of large animals for food and work) sustains more people than the nomadic subsistence practiced by most Aboriginal tribes at that time, the charge that colonists “stole” desirable land from those who had it first retrospectively applies the worth based on its post-colonial use.  As Fynn-Paul writes,

Almost all the modern hubbub about land claims and land redistribution is therefore strongly anachronistic. It attempts to apply a modern agriculturalist’s logic (of high population density and extreme value for small plots of land due to high productivity of said land) to a hunter-gatherer society where populations were miniscule and land was next to valueless due to its extreme unproductivity. However you slice it, it’s an apple-and-orange comparison that does not make sense.

 It’s this awkward contrast – between geography and technology, between memory and modernity – which makes the routine mini-sermons of land acknowledgement so embarrassing.  Not only are they cheap words which have little effect on faraway Aboriginal communities ravaged by poverty, addiction, and suicide, but their offhand magnanimity (“Before we begin tonight’s bingo tournament, let us all remember that we are gathered on the traditional sacred home of the Ojibway people…”) underscores the power of the conquerors over the conquered.  Unquestionably, Canadians whose ancestors came from Europe or elsewhere to seize and settle on others’ homelands have much to be ashamed of.  But Canadians whose ancestors were unable to prevent their homelands being seized and settled on by others have much to be humiliated by, and every patronizing reiteration of that history, however apologetic in tone or respectful in phrase, adds further insult to their injury.