Hola, From Turtle Island, Y’all!
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Are Texas universities pledging to return land to people who never held title to it?
If you’ve been to an event at UT in the last year, you’ve heard the newest addition to the liturgy of the diversity, equity and inclusion priests. It’s called the Land Acknowledgement.
It is useless and dumb. Universities who adopt one suggest it be used in email signatures, syllabi and to open university gatherings. It’s the invocation of the DEI orthodoxy.
Here is the one the University of Texas system is presently using:
We would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what now is called North America.
Moreover, We would like to acknowledge the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas.
Texas Tech and Baylor seems to have avoided this insanity. TCU, Rice, UNT, and U of H all have one. Some departments at Texas A&M display one but no campus-wise statement has been adopted. But this slope is slippery, as all slopes are.
Besides, not all land acknowledgements are created equal. Apparently it’s not enough to make this confession to open a Zoom meeting.
Some social anthropology scholars argue that institutions who chant their thanks and apologies to the people who "owned" the land in the before-time are doing it all wrong. The problem?
Seems most of these land acknowledgements are impotent since they lack a plan to return the land to sovereign Indian nations. Another group, the Native Governance Center whose staff is mostly white, admonishes organizations:
“Don’t sugarcoat the past. Use terms like genocide, ethnic cleansing, stolen land, and forced removal to reflect actions taken by colonizers.”
I'm not sure how they’ll pack the grievances and policy prescriptions into a pre-meeting liturgical chant, but no doubt they'll try.
In an effort to hang with the Cool Kids, we figured we'd try our hand at a Land Acknowledgement of our own. Here it is:
We recognize Lou's BBQ, CC Watch Repair, Harrell's Business School, W. W. Chapman, McIver Furman, the Happy Chicken and the Oak Lounge - the people who built, and the businesses that stewarded, this space before us.
We acknowledge that Carancaguases, Cocos, Cujanes, Guapites and Copanes (collectively, "the Karankawa") once roamed this area. In doing so, we must also recognize that Mexico solicited Anglos to settle here to be a buffer between Mexican population centers and warring Indian bands.
We understand that a clash of civilizations occurred and that the Karankawa people were not victorious.
We recognize that before the Karankawa, people of the Archaic periods sometimes ate, slept and probably warred here.
We acknowledge conquest as historical fact and that land was for winners.
We aren’t giving any land back, but any who would like to go the conquest route…Come and Take it.
