Land Acknowledgments Are Ridiculous Collectivist Nonsense

We're not on indigenous land

One of the favored left-wing shibboleths of the 2020 era was the so-called “land acknowledgment,” wherein the speaker would publicly declare that they were on stolen indigenous land. This odd ritual took place at the Oscars, the 2024 DNC, the Australian parliament, and numerous other places. There was a multi-year period during which more than twelve progressives gathering in one place inevitably devolved into them making tendentious and ill-thought-out claims about the illegitimacy of their possession of property—and claiming that group who really was owed the land they stood on was whichever indigenous group Google informed them five minutes prior was its traditional possessor.

Seen courtesy of Noah Smith. Apparently this is such an obvious truism that you don’t need to be convinced of it, you just have to be reminded of it.

This was always a bizarre performance. If you think you’re in possession of someone else’s stuff, merely acknowledging this fact—particularly when the person isn’t present—is not normally seen as a heroic act. If I am in possession of your stolen car, remarking to its occupants that I’m in a stolen car with no plans to give it back would not ordinarily be considered social justice.

Land acknowledgments were traditionally the purview of a particular type of progressive who believed the world’s gravest evils come from people not talking the right way; that a great many standard utterances are objectionable in ways that are initially invisible, so that one needs the highly sensitive antennae of an HR representative to ascertain the common man’s myriad linguistic sins. It’s never been clear precisely what land acknowledgments were supposed to accomplish or what they were for. They were merely a way for people to signal their left-wing bona fides—to inform the world that they were part of the virtuous minority, in light of their political judgments which happened to resemble those of all their friends.

But it wasn’t just that the speech act was pointless signaling. It was also that the underlying sentiment expressed was never remotely plausible to begin with. There is no important sense in which we are currently standing on native land.

An obvious initial point: if someone else is the rightful owner of one of your possessions, then you ought to give it back. If I steal your car, I should return it. But presumably it would not be alright to boot everyone in the United States—and most of the developed world—off their land and give it to the descendants of native tribes that controlled it hundreds of years ago.

You should not conclude that a sizable fraction of the world’s land is possessed illegitimately, yet that this has no important practical implications. It would be surprising if learning that all the land on which you’ve ever stood is possessed illegitimately implied only that its possessors should engage in routine servile speech acts. Notice that this is not how any other claim of illegitimate possession ever works. People who think that taxation is illegitimate standardly think this has at least some important implications. And the important implications are not that the IRS should hang up big banners in their office declaring “we possess stolen tax dollars.”

Now, maybe some of those who utter this slogan really do believe that non-indigenous Americans should be displaced. But I would think that if you are proposing the single greatest dispossession event in world history, that would leave hundreds of millions of people displaced, you should indicate clearly that you support it and argue for it. I’m all for arguing for controversial conclusions, but you should argue for them and not just throw them out as slogans. My guess is that the members of the Australian parliament claiming that we’re on stolen land would not endorse ethnically cleansing nearly all of their constituents.

As best I can tell, here is the basic argument for our dwelling on stolen land: land was taken from indigenous groups in the distant past. If someone takes your stuff illegitimately, then you remain its rightful owner. Thus, indigenous groups rightfully own most modern land.

But this is extremely dubious. The people from whom the land was stolen cannot be given the land directly due to the minor logistical problem that they’ve been dead for hundreds of years. Instead, we would be giving the land to their descendants.

It’s certainly true that if you take someone’s stuff illegally, they remain the rightful owner. But if hundreds of years pass, and you die, and they die, and the land is sold to third parties, and it’s developed in new ways, it’s not at all clear that the descendants of the original owner have any special claim to it. Claims of property get weaker as more transfers occur, more time passes, and the original owners are no longer in a position to claim it.

Imagine that India had originally been occupied by White Europeans, who were then banished to Europe. Imagine this took place in the year 6,000 BCE. Would modern Europeans then have a right to take over India? Would India then be Caucasian land? Obviously not. Or, to take a more inflammatory modern example, if the Jews really were the original inhabitants of the land that’s now Gaza and the West Bank, would this give them blanket right to boot the Palestinians off their land? Certainly it’s hard to imagine most of those who endorse the claim that we’re on indigenous land signing off on such an arrangement.

It is a historical curiosity that the people who most steadfastly insist that the original possessors of the Americas are owed the land on which we stand are the most likely to claim that it doesn’t matter in the slightest who controlled the Levant in the distant past. For what it’s worth, I agree with the second claim: I don’t think your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should depend on what was happening during the reign of King Solomon. But I have no idea how you can think that while holding that it matters a great deal that indigenous tribes once owned the Americas.

As Noah Smith points out, this view depends on a curious sort of dogma according to which land belongs to people groups rather than individuals. Because indigenous groups today are in some loose sense continuous with the people-groups kicked off their land, they are its rightful possessors. But this is not a plausible account of how ownership works, and it’s not one we apply in any other context. We don’t typically think that the state in which a person dwells is the rightful possessor of her house.

In addition, it’s not clear that this would end up well for the indigenous tribes that possessed land immediately before Europeans displaced them. In nearly all cases, they got their land from taking it from another tribe. For example, when land was returned to the Hawaiians, it was returned to the descendants of an empire that has seized the land by force just a few generations prior. In what sense could those people possibly be the rightful possessors in any deep moral sense?

To decide who owns land today, do we really need to identify the descendants of the very first people who ever laid eyes on some plot of land? And in most cases, the original inhabitants may not have a single clear successor—one tribe may have fractured into two, or have many descendants. In such cases, which one gets it? Should indigenous tribes similarly perform land acknowledgements, acknowledging the rightful owners of their land are whichever indigenous groups happened to be first?

Billie Eilish recently claimed that “no person is illegal on stolen land.” This is a very strange statement. Shouldn’t it be that everyone is illegal on stolen land? If lots of people are inhabiting stolen property—with one of them a squatter that the others don’t know about—we would not ordinarily say that none of them is engaged in lawbreaking.

Most people who make these claims have not thought in detail about their implications. Claiming that we are on indigenous land was the edgy and hip thing to say around 2020, so people said it without giving much thought to whether it was right. But you should think before you say things so that you don’t make proud proclamations that are both ridiculous and false.

The land acknowledgment stuff never made any sense; it was always just a way to signal that you were one of the Righteous Good People. Those of us on the left should ditch the unreflective quasi-religious sloganeering that predominated throughout the 2020 era and instead make an evidence-based case for the things we support. It’s a party-wide embarrassment that so many people of non-trivial prominence regularly regurgitate such racialist nonsense.